As family after family finds their greatest weaknesses exploited by a house that appears almost sentient, the cracks threaten to shatter the entire neighborhood’s peace. The story walks that skillful line of truth so well-received in horror: we think the house is evil but perhaps our narrator is just a bit mad. Once I understood that what made me shiver in this book would make the lead characters absolutely quake, I appreciated the horror even more. In a wealthy world in which outward trappings of success like a beautiful home, expensive furnishings, inviolate reputation, and a harmonious family are as necessary as air, the idea that pursuit of those things could destroy all of them is the most terrifying thing possible. Yet for the loathsomely rich, attractive, idle Colquitt and Walter, the house next door represents a far more fundamental negation of their lifelong belief system. While I enjoyed reading about a potentially evil house next door to Walter and Colquitt - a house, they gradually speculate, that perverts the dearest qualities or belongings of its residents in the most mind-breaking, life-ruining ways possible - I was only appreciating the story from my middle-class perspective. But in the end, my inability to identify with the lead characters turned out to be a major element to the book’s effectiveness as a sneak-up-on-you horror novel.

From the get-go I resented the effortless, underappreciated lifestyle they had been granted (not earned) by virtue of money and old family names in places where old family names mean anything. The rich, restrained WASPy couple in The House Next Door are not of my social class. Horror novel or class war? Let’s have both.

The house next door siddons