Good Neighbors

I just love Sarah Langan. I've read her for ages and long awaited a new novel. Though this is technically less horror than her usual work, I still loved it.

An ex-rockstar and ex-beauty queen, both from rough backgrounds, move their family from Brooklyn to a Long Island suburb. At first, things are all right. The family have issues, but they really care about each other. The mother becomes friends with a neighbor, a community college professor who tanked her own career with a predilection for violence and heavy delusion.

This takes place in the near future, the very near future, and climate change has made the earth strange. Sinkholes appear across the country, including in the suburb. When the professor neighbor's daughter falls into the sinkhole, the professor goes off the deep end and begins to blame the rockstar husband. By claiming he molested her child.

And everything spirals from there.

I devoured this book. It tackles issues of class, urban vs. suburban, death and mourning, and human interrelations. Which, in this book, are messy. But there is some hope at the end, despite all the terrible things that happen.