Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door

What’s a house without a ghost? Still one bad motherfucker, if The House Next Door is to be believed. It doesn’t need any incorporeal spirit rattling its chains or throwing plates. Those are so… last year. Instead, it relies on a person’s own weaknesses, feeding them until they become grotesqueries and horrors beyond imagining. And what if you just happen to live next door to all of the zany butchery?

That’s the premise of The House Next Door. The neighbors, Colquitt and Walter, are pissed when they find out the empty lot next to their house— in a very influential Atlanta neighborhood— is to be no more. A newly-minted architect has been hired by an old money daughter of the South to build a house that says fuck daddy in all its glory. Colquitt and Walter do come around on it, even becoming close friends with the architect, as they see his talent come alive in the form of a modern home. Then shit starts to go down.

After several suspicious wildlife maulings, the new neighbors lose everything that is valuable to them: a child, reputation, their father— until they are driven from the home in an attempt to to maintain their reputations. Two more families follow, along with various incidences of “bad luck” with those who visit the house. The architect loses his talent, other neighbors watch their son throw his life away, and  “Col,” as the book often calls her, and Walter almost implode an otherwise impenetrable marriage. Walking into this house is the karma equivalent of breaking a billion mirrors and passing under a ladder on your way out. It takes a family or two, as well as the drunken ramblings of the architect, before anyone believes something might be going on and Col/Walt find a reason to start taking… action. 

Siddons is known for her slice of Southern, and I think that shows well in this horror story. One has to move those stories at a certain pace, or they become absolute trudges. In this case, it meant there was always more action with enough of the slice of life to make the story of this strange house in a conservative (of course, they think themselves liberal), old money community feel like an avoidable tragedy.

There are some issues with language used to describe an queer entanglement. In addition, a Jewish character is portrayed as a new money-hungry boo. It’s an unforgivable part of an otherwise good book, even though many might say it perfectly emulates the mindset of the Southern WASP who happened to write in 1978 about other Southern WASPS. It definitely shows how even those who consider themselves on the right side of the Civil Rights movement are the type who speak and act one way in public and become entirely different people within their cloistered communities.

Would I Read it Again?: Yeah. Apparently I rushed a little at the end and missed important information. This happened a couple of times and I had to go back to correct my understanding. The book isn’t so spectacular that I would read it again just for enjoyment, since I feel like I got most of what I needed the first time.

Rating: 3. The writing was solid, but the Jewish character really just threw off everything for me, especially with all the calls to it the characters make. I knocked a point off for that since it wasn’t just narrator perception framing the racism. 

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