Make sure to read on past my review for an exclusive interview with Sarah Langan, where I get to ask her about the book!
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'Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world.
'But when the Wilde family moves in, they trigger their neighbours' worst fears. Arlo and Gertie and their weird kids don't fit with the ways Maple Street sees itself.
'As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and neighbourhood Queen Bee Rhea's daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes. Suddenly, it is one mom's word against the others in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood.'
One of the things that's really hit home for a lot of people over the last year of lock-downs and isolation's is how important our homes are to us. It's probably something that a lot of people never thought about until they were spending the vast majority of their time stuck at home, but they're an incredibly important part of our lives. But it's not just your home that matters, its the people who live around you. Your neighbours and the community can dictate whether your home feels like a safe haven, or if it leaves you constantly on edge.
Good Neighbours shows readers what should be a perfect neighbourhood, a place where people are friendly with each other, where they share their thoughts on the community group social media, where they get together to have barbecues, where the kids can play safely. When it's working the way it should it's a wonderful place to live; but when things start to go bad it can be the neighbours around you who can make your life hell.
Maple Street is a community that most of us would want to live in, but very quickly, before the bad stuff even begins to happen, we get a sense that there's something awful just beneath this perfect veneer. The neighbourhood seems to be ruled by Rhea Schroeder, a college professor who acts like the den mother for the families on the block, but is in fact a master manipulator, and coldly evil woman.
We see this when the Wilde family, who have recently moved into the neighbourhood, are left out of the community's fourth of July celebration. Rhea makes it clear to Gertie Wilde that it wasn't an accident that they were the only ones not invited, though Gertie has no idea what the family could have done to receive this kind of treatment. Before anything can be made of this, however, the ground in the park literally opens up beneath them as a sinkhole appears; putting an end to the festivities.
Over the coming days, with the summer heat soaring and the fumes and bitumen leaking from the hole in the middle of their community, tensions continue to build around the Wilde's. Things come to a head one day when Shelly, Rhea's daughter reveals a dark secret to Julia Wilde. Then a terrible accident happens, and Shelly falls into the sinkhole.
As the search for the missing girl goes on and on it becomes clear that the child won't be found alive, and as the neighbourhood mourns this terrible tragedy Rhea begins to start rumours. She claims that Shelly was trying to run away from Arlo Wilde, who was amongst the various adults trying to get the kids away from the sinkhole. She claims that Arlo has raped her daughter, and possibly multiple kids on the block.
This begins a mob mentality that grows and grows as the summer wears on. The parents of the neighbourhood begin to suspect that Rhea's claims might be right, then that perhaps their own kids were molested at Arlo's hands. They look at the Wilde's, a family so different from the rest of them, with different accents and a low income background, and decide that they're a danger. Taking justice into their own hands the neighbourhood soon descends into a state of horrific vigilante justice.
Good Neighbours ended up being something of a very disturbing book to read. Not because it included references to child sexual abuse (something that is only a wild rumour in the book anyway), but because of how terrifyingly real the mob mentality of the people on Maple Street was. Because of our vantage point as the readers we get to see everything that happens in this book. We see the events that lead up to the tragic death of Shelly, and know that Arlo Wilde is completely innocent; but we have to watch at the others start to listen to the accusations against him and go from outright denial to thinking there's a chance they could be true. We see these seeds of doubt turn into a conviction that this man must be a paedophile, and that anything done to him is more than justified.
It's almost terror inducing how quickly things spin out of control in this story, and how these average, normal people become driven to abuse, vandalism, and even violence because they've become convinced of something that's just flat out wrong. Even when their kids are telling them it's not true, that Arlo never did anything to them they're rationalising attacking him in the street.
Where so many thrillers keep the real events a mystery, hoping that the reader will try to work things out Good Neighbours takes on a very different approach, and is so much stronger because of it. You end up feeling so much for the Wilde's, you become worried for what will happen to them, and you'll even begin to hate these 'normal' everyday people who are being twisted into a violent, hateful mob.
One of the things that made the story so affecting for me is that I've seen this. It happens every day. It's not motivated by a child falling into a sinkhole, but I've seen how rumours and lies are used by one malicious figure to turn others into a force for evil. We see it with the nastiness of people refusing to take precautions during the pandemic because they've bought into lies about medicine. We see it with political supporters being whipped into performing armed insurrection because they've been fed lies about the political process. We see it with the daily attacks on trans and queer people by those who peddle recycled ideas that rights are being stripped away from others, or that children are in danger.
It's so ridiculously easy for people to buy into false narratives because everyone wants to feel like they're the smart ones. Everyone wants to be the one to be able to say 'I saw the truth' and 'I did the right thing', so they engage in reckless actions convinced that they're in the right; and nothing that is said to them can sway them because then they'll have to admit they're caused harm. This is what takes centre stage of Good Neighbours, this horrible, twisted part of human nature; and because of that, this book felt haunting to read. It was something I felt I'd seen before in real life, and something I'm afraid could one day happen to me and those I love.
Sarah Langan does a brilliant job at piling on the pressure, of crafting a narrative that on one hand makes you want to stop reading because you know something awful is coming, yet urges you to read on because you need to see that happens next. But she doesn't just rely on the heart pounding story to drag you in, but also crafts some wonderfully engaging and intriguing characters too.
The leads of the book, the Wilde's feel like the most human characters in the book. They're flawed people. They openly admit that they come from backgrounds that the rest of their neighbourhood would happily look down on, yet are always trying to be the best kind of people they can be. Gertie is a former beauty pageant contestant who's had to grow up being abused and assaulted, she's had so much grief in her life, yet always tries to present a happy and friendly face to others. Even when things are going awfully for the family she's fighting her own inner demons to carry on and support those around her. Arlo, her husband, has a similar past. Having been a semi-famous singer who's battled drug addiction in the past he's had to put his life back together, and his family are a huge part of that.
Sadly, the people on Maple Street judge them by their looks, by Gertie's beauty and Arlo's tattoos, and can't allow themselves to see the good people beneath these trappings. They make snap second decisions about the kind of people they are because of their outward appearances and their accents. The fact that Gertie and Arlo know this, can see their neighbours thinking these things about them, but still try and be nice and friendly and kind speaks volumes to the kind of people they are.
Good Neighbours is a very human drama, one that's driven by very real fears and prejudices, ones that I think we've probably all seen in our lives. Yes, it might be set several years in the future, it might have a narrative about global warming and the damage it has taken on the world, but thanks to how grounded the rest of the book feels this speculation about what our future might end up being like feels like something that's almost certain. Let's just hope that our future is filled with neighbours like the Wilde's, rather than Rhea Schroeder.
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Hi Sarah, thank you very much for taking the time to answer some questions about Good Neighbours, I really enjoyed the book and am super excited that I’m able to ask you a few questions about such an engrossing read.
I am so grateful! Thanks for reading it and liking it!
Good Neighbours is set a handful of years into the future, and makes the changes brought on by pollution and global warming a background element of the story. What made you choose to make this relatively small time jump, and what impact did this allow you to have on the narrative?
I wanted to heighten the anxiety people are feeling about the future. Global warming is happening at a much more accelerated pace than any of us imagined. It hasn’t really affected Long Island, where I’m from and where the story is set, just yet, but in a few more years, the summers will likely be much hotter. I wanted to capture that sense of bewilderment, in which even the adults are unmoored. There’s this night time logic that happens when unpredictable, natural things happen—hails falls in summer, anthrax rises up from melted permafrost, sinkholes open. It all has a rational explanation, but it also feels much bigger than that. Much more ominous.
The book struck me as a story that felt very real, where the quickly escalating fervour in Maple Street is fuelled by outlandish stories that people are quickly willing to believe because of an almost mob mentality. Were there any real world examples that inspired this, or is it simply something that you see on small scale in places like social media?
I was thinking about the ways people act on Facebook and Twitter. We’ve become very polarized and we’ve lost nuance. It’s affected our ability to have real dialogues. It’s reduced our political debates. It’s empowered corporate interests. It’s sold us the lie that we’re empowered, when if fact, every time we log in, we’re chucking that power down a hole.
I wanted to investigate that instinct inside all of us, that drives us toward tribal behaviour. In real life, I’m often surprised by the ways many people I follow on social media act. They’re decent people in real life, but pretty insufferable online. They get validated for making blanket statements, for casting judgement and defining some people as good and others as bad. It’s a ridiculous way to behave.
I was horrified by the storming of the capitol. I was surprised by it, too. But given what I wrote, I shouldn’t have been.
The Wilde family seem like a very likeable group, and despite Gertie and Arlo having some trauma in their past they came across as a very average, normal family. Did you try to make them average in a way to heighten the tension of the experience of having a neighbourhood turn on you, as a way of putting your reader into their shoes?
I did – I wanted them to be very relatable. They were actually too nice in the early drafts – I had to make Gertie a less fantastic mom, Arlo a scarier dad, and Julia a little meaner. Larry’s still a cutie pie.
I used to have this habit, where I was too hard on my characters. They had too many flaws. I thought this was realistic, but as I grow older, I can see that it’s important to show the good things, too. So, some of my depiction of the Wildes was my effort to be accurate. I think they’re great people.
Maple Street seemed like a pretty regular neighbourhood to begin with, but over time it became clear that most of the people there were very different from the Wilde’s, and most of them seems to come from a place of better wealth and privilege. Did you go into the book wanting to write a story that took a little look at class and wealth, or was that something that evolved over the course of writing the book?
I grew up in a town called Garden City, on Long Island, and this book is set in a town called Garden City, on Long Island. My town growing up was very homogenous. It was great in many ways, and also stifling in many ways. I think people who are too much alike tend to compare very small differences. For instance, we knew what everybody’s parents did for a living, and who had houses in the Hamptons. The people struggling in that town felt very invisible, and like they had a lot to hide. So, I was thinking about that, and I was also thinking about the American Dream, and how the cost of buying into it keeps rising.
Did you have to do a lot of research into how people react in large groups, where the truth gets twisted and people act out of control, in order to write the story; and if so, what kinds of things did you look into?
I studied the Kitty Genovese case. She was murdered in front of her building in Queens in 1964. The urban legend that I was taught in sociology class as true, was that none of her neighbours called the police. In school, this case is used to explain the bystander effect. But the more I researched, the more I realized that story was a lie. In fact, lots of people called the police, but the cops never showed up, so to cover their own reputations, they lied about it. Kitty didn’t die alone, either. A neighbour saw her struggling, ran out, and held her in her arms. My friend Billy Picard told me that the legend got traction because of white flight. White people felt guilty about moving out of cities, and this gave them the excuse to blame themselves (Kitty, her neighbours, and her attacker were all white) instead of the black people they were running from.
I also studied the Stanford Prison Experiments, in which students were cast as either guards or prisoners, and became sadists or masochists, accordingly. The study posits that humans are very weak, and our natures pretty horrific. It’s also a lie. The experiment was flawed. The professor who ran it let his students know the results he was looking for, and being polite, good kids, the students complied.
The more I researched, the more I realized that people are actually pretty good. But sometimes, our best instincts get hijacked. My story is about the monster within.
The character of Rhea struck me as a bit of a broken person. She’s very much a narcissist, and is behind pretty much everything awful that happens in the book, but I couldn’t help but feel it was because she was never given help that she needed and had to struggle alone most of her life. Did you intentionally make her something of a victim in order to not have an ‘evil’ villain?
I think she is a victim! Being a mom is very difficult, because we’re expected to be perfect. I wanted this book to show the ways that kind of thinking, that forced mask, can really damage a person, and can damage a family. We all live behind these closed doors, and it strikes me as a pretty stupid way to live.
I did study narcissism in-depth to get Rhea right. It’s a very serious illness, caused by deep neglect. I think the word gets thrown around much more than it should.
The children of Maple Street seem to view the sink hole that opens in the park as something a little bit more than just a hole, and it takes on a quasi-magical nature in their minds. As the person who created the story can you say whether that’s something that existed purely in the kids minds, or is there something a bit out of the ordinary going on too?
I love this question, but I want to leave the answer to the reader. It’s open-ended.
Your other books seem to have a much more horror bent to it, and because of how awful the events of Good Neighbours are, and how much it got under my skin I’d say it definitely borders on a horror very much grounded in reality; but were you ever tempted to make it a more overt horror story at any point?
Oh, yes! I was tempted to make it a horror story. But it the book resisted my efforts—Rhea in particular. She wanted the stage, and she wanted to tell her very human story, about people, and our follies, and our beauty. I had to learn to write in a different way, and it was hard. I kept worrying that this new way of telling a story would bore people if there weren’t any monsters. Happily, it seems that it didn’t!
Are there any writers that have been an influence on you over the years, or any stories that have particularly inspired you?
I love both Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen and Megan Abbot’s You Will Know Me. I learned a lot about writing from studying both of them. I also re-read Stephen King’s Carrie while writing Good Neighbours. It’s his first book, but it’s also his most efficient one. I wanted this book to be stark and pared down. The kind of book a reader would open and not be able to close. Another novel I love is Eudora Welty’s Golden Apples. Munro’s short stories are pretty fantastic, too!
If people enjoyed this book what can they look forward to seeing from you in the future? Are there any projects that you’re working on at the moment that you can tease?
I wrote a very long short story called Night Nurse, in an anthology called Hex Life, that’s now out. I also wrote a novella called “You Have the Prettiest Mask,” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. You can read the first chapter in Lithub, and decide if you want the rest.
Right now, I’m working on the television adaption of Good Neighbours along with my next novel, Mom’s Night Out, which was sold to Simon and Schuster as: The Stepford Wives meets The Lottery. I’m hoping to live up to it!
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