Product Description

It is a sad day for Colquitt and Walter Kennedy whenconstruction begins on an elegant new home on the formerly empty lot next door. It signals the end of an era of blessed tranquility, of sipping drinks on the porch in the quiet of a warm southern afternoon. But Colquitt and Walter are losing more than a view. With a new house come new neighbors -- with their secrets and fears and frailties that will not be contained within four strong walls, reaching out instead to wreak havoc with other lives and relationships. For there's something about the house next door that seems to bring out the worst in those who live there. And soon, nothing in the Kennedys' once-idyllic neighborhood will ever be the same again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #631973 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 356 pages

From Amazon.com
Anne Rivers Siddons is a writer of literary fiction whose one foray into the horror genre is this remarkable 1978 novel, The House Next Door. The setting is a wealthy suburb in Atlanta where an ambitious young architect is building a dramatically contemporary house. The novel uses a frame device to put three short stories under a single cover: as each of three families moves into the house in succession, we watch the bad things that happen to them and eventually force them to leave. But the frame itself--the observations of an urbane and sophisticated couple who live next door and become close friends with the architect--is the most deeply involving story in the book.

Stephen King was so impressed by The House Next Door that when he wrote Danse Macabre, his personal tour of the horror genre, he sought out Siddons for an interview. She told him, "The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her.... It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear.... So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bone-deep horror and disgust."

Siddons was also fascinated by how the supernatural has the power to disturb the complacent rich and their comfortable little world: "What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pâté in every terrine and a BMW in every garage? Primitive man might howl before his returning dead and point; his neighbor would see, and howl along with him.... The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw."

One caveat: some people find the ending a false note that mars the effect. Even so, The House Next Door is an exquisite horror novel. --Fiona Webster

From AudioFile
This spellbinding story of supernatural terror vibrates with emotion and atmosphere. Rosenblat and Siddons are an unbeatable combination! Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a peaceful, friendly, Southern neighborhood; but after a new house is built next to them, all that is in the past. Though the Kennedys are a rational couple, the pattern of events that destroys every person living in that house is hard to explain or ignore. As haunting as the tale is, Rosenblat makes the unbelievable sound believable. Reading captively, with concise, even pacing, she draws the listener deeply into the horror. S.C.A. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Ingram
The house next door to the Kennedys appears to be haunted by a mysterious, all-pervasive evil, and the couple watches in horror as a succession of owners becomes engulfed by the same sinister force, until the Kennedys set out to destroy the house themselves. Reprint.