The House Next Door

This work of Southern gothic / horror fiction is a little slow to start but once it gets going it's riveting!

Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a lovely home in a friendly Atlanta suburb. They and their neighbors visit one another regularly, enjoy cocktails after work, play tennis on weekends, and attend parties at various homes. The Kennedys are pleased to live next door to a vacant lot whose narrowness and ravined terrain have always ensured it stays vacant, an oasis of natural beauty in their neighborhood. Until a young couple hires a hot-shot architect who designs a spectacular house that seems to just grow out of the land. The house is still under construction when odd things start to happen. Not just odd, but downright show more malevolent and horrific.

I stayed up way too late a couple of nights "waiting for that other shoe to drop." It left me on edge and vaguely anxious; spooked by noises in the night (or in the daytime). Reminds me of the hoopla around [book:The Amityville Horror|325534] - a book I read when it first came out in the late '70s. A perfect Halloween read! show less

I’ve seen THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR on so many “Best of Horror” lists, and now I know why. It’s an enthralling blend of Southern gothic fiction and quiet horror. The creepy, slow-build kind that makes you question what’s really going on, something sinister or is your mind playing tricks?

This book was originally published in the 1970s and is set during that time. Colquitt and her husband Walter live in an upscale Atlanta neighborhood. There’s a lot of tennis at the club, parties with the neighbors, and day drinking for these folks. Don’t get me wrong! I liked Colquitt and Walter.

For many years an empty wooded “unbuildable” lot sat next to their house, and that’s how they liked it. Then one day, a talented young architect show more finds a way to build newlyweds their modern dream home on that lot. Neighbors don’t like it, but what can you do? They welcome the couple into the fold, then have to stand back helplessly while their dream home becomes a nightmare. And this happens over and over, tragedy finding each family that moves in.

“In the moonlight the ice-sheathed trees tossed and tinkled like great crystal hands fingering the sky, weaving and reweaving an incantation over the sweetly sleeping shape of the house next door.”

I greatly enjoyed the author’s haunting, beautiful writing and her flawed & memorable characters. I especially loved trying to figure out that malevolent house and its terrible influence on the occupants & neighbors. This is the first book by Siddons I’ve read, and I understand her other books are more contemporary Southern fiction — probably wonderful, but I so wish she had written more horror like THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR. show less

This is not a typical Anne Rivers Siddons novel. It is a haunted house story, a subtle one. I've read it three times now. It is a quick read, and I think it benefits from rereads. The horror in this book is creepy and discomforting--and it raises a lot of questions. Is the house truly evil? The evidence, as Colquitt points out more than once, is scanty and circumstantial.

I think the true genius of this book is how it portrays the world of the Southern suburban street where the story takes place as a fragile idyll, a carefully constructed and maintained fiction, and the house represents a primal reality that can easily puncture that bubble, one that exists inside all of us. After all, it was the people who lived in and around the house, show more and their flaws, the unraveling of the fictions they told themselves, that led to their own downfalls. Isn't it even possible that Colquitt herself is an unreliable narrator, desperately spinning her own fiction of the perfect marriage, the desirable, happily childless woman living her best life, cultivating the attention of men and petty jealousies of women to prop up her own deluded picture of herself? Looked at that way (epilogue aside), it makes the ending so much more chilling.

This was published in the 1970s, by the way, and is dated in the way it talks about homosexuality and mental illness. show less

This novel sucked me in from the start, and but for a bit of Vietnam referencing that sets it in the 70s, it is otherwise timeless and very unsettling. So unsettling, that having finished it yesterday, I dreamed about it last night, my brain still sorting it out. This is a brain worm story that will be stuck in my head for some time. Originally, I was hoping for a ghost story which it is not, I'd say perhaps more psychological horror or weird fiction. However you classify it, it's excellent, in my opinion.

Stephen King lists [The House Next Door] as one of his all-time favorite horror novels in his academic treatise on horror literature, [Danse Macabre]. [[Anne River Siddons]] is certainly not a name typically associated with horror, but don't quibble with Uncle Stevie.

An upper-middle-class couple on the rise purchase their dream home in a tree-lined, bucolic Atlanta suburb. But when the empty lot next door attracts the attention of an architect, their provincial life tilts off its access. Home owner after home owner meet strange and violent ends. Eventually, the malevolence from the neighboring house reaches out to them, until they are faced with a horrible choice between violence and madness.

Siddons is a wonderful writer, and one I show more wouldn't have read without Uncle Stevie's recommendation. Perhaps her other work is focused on the more mundane, but it opens up a new writer, nonetheless.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended show less

This book was Fan-Freaking-Tastic!

Our narrator, Colquitt, is a hoity-toity lady of society in Atlanta in the 1970's. She and her husband Walter live next door to a beautiful wooded lot with a creek and their life is nearly perfect. Until the lot is sold to a couple who plan to build a beautiful modern home with lots of glass and chrome. Once the house goes up, perfection leaves their lives forever.

I normally don't get into the plot in my reviews, and I'm not going to delve too deeply here, but there is one interesting thing that I would like to mention. I'm going to put a spoiler tag here, even though this is just an observation of mine, because it's something you should discover on your own.

At the heart of it, this is a haunted show more house book. However, not one supernatural thing occurred in this book, depending on how the reader views it. Each thing that happened could easily be the result of flawed humanity. It's just that the building of occurrences, one atop the other, leads the reader to believe otherwise. It caused Colquitt and Walter to believe otherwise as well.

The characters in this story are complicated and well drawn. Colquitt describes life in her "set" with humility and grace. It's funny, as this soap opera of a story continues, to find out what she discovers about some of her friends and neighbors; none of it is good. In my eyes, over and above the "haunting" itself, this is a tale of social classes and the differences between them. It's also a tad of commentary on the old south as well. Even though Colquitt does come across as humble most of the time, there are a few incidents where she is just downright snobby, and she doesn't even realize it.

All of this in a story told through outstanding, yet simple, prose. The atmosphere becomes palpable and the reader's dread just grows and grows. There is no true gore, there are no gross out moments...just a slow burning tale of something gone wrong with a house. And then going wrong again. And then going wrong again.

Do you dare enter The House Next Door? I highly recommend that you do! show less

Yes. Excellent. Starts off great. Then holding pattern for a while. I found the whole story of the second couple super boring. Then SHTF around 67% and gallops all the way to the end.

There's a chunk of MAJOR classism later in the book that was kind of jarring but I suspect/hope it was characterization on Siddons's part. The casual wealth of Colquitt and Walter and their entire perfect street continually interested me as it was so foreign!

This is indeed about a haunted house, or a haunted property, or maybe everything happening is coincidence - we don't find out which until later - but it is also about relationships, and what we hold dear, and how what we hold dear can be weaponized to destroy us. And about how fragile relationships can show more be. And perhaps about shared madness, but within the one or those you share the madness with, you feel and sound completely sane. Or maybe it's not madness, and maybe the ever more strange and terrible things you plan to do to save the world from the house...is CAUSED by the house.

SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.

Maybe you, in your rich little enclave with your fancy trips and beach house, maybe you're not much better than those poor people you sneer at later in the book. Maybe you're so twisted you'd kill a young man because of some coincidental deaths that happened near him and you're convinced he's got evil inside him because, even though his having rich parents would absolve him of innate evil in your eyes (sigh), he committed the sin of being ADOPTED and thus the theory of innate evil sticks and they murder him.

I liked watching the descent of Colquitt and Walter. I liked watching the descent of the neighborhood. It was harrowing and I gasped more than once. I like the twist in theory but the above is why on general, no. Also the end is rushed. I liked the slice of the 70s. show less