Arlo is a former rock star and heroin addict, while Gertie is a former beauty pageant queen and abuse victim.
Told in third-person narration, with clips from fictional books and newspaper articles interjecting, the story centers on the family of Arlo and Gertie Wilde. Good Neighbours is set in a very hot summer where climate change has led the thermometer to break the 100-degree Fahrenheit mark on multiple consecutive days. So there are similarities and differences between the two works that are quite startling, but if I had to read one of these books again, I would lean toward Good Neighbors and its clipped prose - simply because it is the more entertaining of the two novels. While Jackson’s book was set in the not-so-distant past of the California town she grew up in, Good Neighbors is set in 2027 Long Island, where the author was raised. While The Road Through the Wall was stuffed with characters that share a neighbourhood street, Good Neighbors is focused more on two families that live on a street in a different neighbourhood and zip code.
However, Good Neighbors is not a horror novel - at least, not in the conventional sense - and it veers more toward Jackson’s 1948 debut The Road Through the Wall than it does, say, The Haunting of Hill House. Horror author Sarah Langan’s new novel, Good Neighbors, is being promoted by her publisher as being just like the work of mid-20th Century author Shirley Jackson.
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