Onyx reviews: Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 2/9/2021

Good fences make good neighbors, but there aren't enough fences on Maple Street in Garden City to do the trick. Eighteen families live on the crescent in a suburb of Long Island, most of them outwardly affluent and upwardly mobile. They hold block parties and the kids all play together.

One family isn't quite like the others, though. Arlo Wilde is a one-time bad-boy rock star with a heroin addiction history. Gertie, his wife, is a former beauty queen whose overt voluptuousness is at odds with her more demure neighbors. Twelve-year-old Julia is fairly well adjusted, but she is louder and cruder than the other kids. Her eight-year-old brother Larry is a special needs child, sensitive to loud sounds, criticism and conflict. The Wildes can afford to live on Maple Street, but that doesn't mean they belong. Gertie hopes they can learn how to be more properly upper-middle class from their neighbors, but Arlo annoys people simply by smoking on the front porch instead of out back, like everyone else.

However, self-appointed queen of Maple Street Rhea Schroeder's deliberate efforts to embrace the Wildes was all the others needed to accept them, despite perceived class differences. Julia becomes part of the Rat Pack of youngsters, and Larry, despite his issues, is allowed to tag along, too.

Rhea, though, has a dark past she has kept carefully hidden from her neighbors. She's in a loveless marriage with a mostly absentee husband, leaving her to raise their daughter. During one of their frequent wine-fueled get-togethers, Rhea reveals some of her darker thoughts to Gertie. Gertie isn't shocked—she's embarrassed for her inebriated friend and doesn't respond.

Rhea's long-simmering shame bubbles to the surface; she misinterprets Gertie's silence and decides to cut Gertie out of the neighborhood's social network without explanation. Things are already tense on Maple Street when a massive sinkhole opens during a July 4th picnic (to which the Wildes were pointedly not invited). Global warming and climate change claim their first victims: a section of Sterling Park and a dog. Soon thereafter, the sinkhole claims a human victim. In the aftermath, the seemingly perfect neighborhood begins to self-destruct.

Good Neighbors blends Desperate Housewives with The Crucible. To cover her own complicity, Rhea shifts the blame for the accident to someone else, using the kinds of allegations that are both hard to disprove and impossible to recover from, no matter how much evidence to the contrary arises. Soon, everyone on Maple Street falls under the spell of "fake news," contributing their own spins in an effort to belong and to feel important. It isn't collusion—it's a case of emotional hysteria that spreads throughout the neighborhood. The children who were willing co-conspirators at first try to come to their senses, but by then it's too late. The damage has been done.

The sinkhole is a constant annoyance. Cell phones don't work, there's a horrible smell and goops of tar begin to emerge from the ground. The residents are livid over the failure of local authorities to help with any of their problems, including a fruitless search for the missing girl. The abnormally hot weather pushes tempers to the limit and a gradual exodus from Maple Street begins. Violence erupts among those left behind, surprising even those who are responsible for it. When cooler heads try to prevail, they are met with a wall of denial. The fictitious theory of events has become so firmly entrenched in almost everyone's minds, it's impossible to overcome.

The fake news expands beyond local gossip and innuendo. Langan—taking a cue from Stephen King's Carrie—foreshadows the outcome by way of newspaper clippings, interviews with the principles, blog posts, articles, academic papers, some published long after the events of July 2028, many of which still cling to long-debunked myths about the incidents on Maple Street. Good Neighbors paints a damning portrait of suburbia, the facades people present to the rest of the world, and the way facts can get in the way of a convenient untruth.