What I've Read: The House Next Door

I'm still searching for a good October ghost story. The local library, where I get most of my reading materials, is pretty small so the choices are limited. Aside from a plethora of Stephen King, the better-known haunted stories pretty much begin and end with Shirley Jackson. So I have to dig pretty deep to find something to fit the bill. Which leads me to today's review.

The Book:

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

The Premise In My Own Words:

The Kennedys live in an upper/middle-class neighborhood in New England. They enjoy their easy-going lifestyle, their relationships with the neighbors, their little vacations to the beach house. All that is disrupted when an up-and-coming architect is commissioned to build a home on the vacant lot next door. The home is impressive and loved by anyone who sets eyes on it. But there's more to the architectural wonder than beauty. With each new occupant of the house, the Kennedys realize something sinister now occupies the once vacant lot.

The Review:

There are a lot of things working in this book's favor. Anne Rivers Siddons does a good job with her story. It feels straightforward and lacks any of the convoluted and unnecessary stray threads of the last novel I reviewed, Home Before Dark. Apparently, Stephen King even included a lengthy write-up about this novel in his non-fiction Danse Macabre, praising its Southern Gothic roots. I do see the parallels between The House Next Door and Gothic literature. There is a lot of emphasis on setting, less on action. That's not a bad thing, either.

Where the book most let me down was in the main characters. They're white, affluent, rich enough to travel to New York on a whim, and completely unrelatable. In no way could I relate to the Kennedys. All of their problems, like, all their problems, traced back in some way or another to their affluence.

Where the novel redeemed itself is the ending. While jarringly abrupt, the ending took an unexpected turn and caught me off-guard. I liked it. Even a day after finishing it, I'm still sitting here thinking about the ending, if the actions of the Kennedys' fit their personalities or if those out of character qualities were intentional. Maybe, as the novel suggest all along the way, the house itself was influencing the outcome.

Score:

3/5 stars

Pair With:

The Kennedys throw cocktail parties, they attend cocktail parties, they go out for drinks, they have friends over for drinks. They live in New England. Mix up a Cape Cod.