Good Neighbors

Sarah Langan tells you the story of a crime on Maple Street in layers, peeling back the lives of the residents there. While it may seem like a regular suburb, nothing is quite as it seems. Secrets are almost the lifeblood of the street. With news snippets, dissertations, and articles, along with the traditional narrative, the novel immerses the reader into the world Sarah Langan created. But the most impressive part is how trapped the temperature, the very environment itself, makes you feel. Unable to escape that, even the fairly benign secrets of Maple Street feel heavy.

In Good Neighbors, author Sarah Langan takes everything that’s familiar: the petty rivalries of a middle-class cul de sac, the oppressive heat of summer fueled by climate change, and the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, and she dials it up and then flips it into a place that is both familiar and startling and utterly terrifying. This book left me deliciously unsettled for days.

Quite honestly one of my favorite books that I’ve read this year. There’s a literal sinkhole at the center of the story, but the novel itself serves as its own metaphorical quicksand. Once I ambled into its narrative, I could not crawl back out. I just had to keep reading and reading… A perfect example of modern-day witch hunts, and how we are only one rumor away from a full-on suburban lynch mob.