I've just finished The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons. Shaay Gallagher recommended it to me, and I had to order it from the USA, which is always exciting.I thought it was an extremely well-constructed novel, and by the end I was full of admiration for it, although it took me a while to get there.
By the way, if you like the video intro sequence made for the start of my Youtube videos it was down by Powders Playground. And I would love you to enjoy her filmed (not AI) gothic, atmospheric videos, if you could go and subscribe to her channel. It costs nothing and I hope it will help her.
Anyway, back to The House Next Door. The premise is that a wonderful, house beautiful is designed and built by a talented young architect on a previously vacant lot next door to a 'very nice' family on a 'very nice' street, and, turns out, the house is haunted.
Yep, the house destroys people, and not only the ones who live in it. Visitors are caught by it too, and so is anyone who has anything to do with it. It messes them up this by finding each person's vices and working on them at their weakest points. I don't want to give away any more than that, because the pleasure of this book is in watching it happen. But there is a rule of three, or maybe a three plus one...
The Unlikeable Rich
My initial difficulty was with the people we see it through.
The viewpoint is a woman called Colquitt, and her husband is Walter, and they are what I believe Americans would call very preppy. They're not even Yuppies, they are well-groomed, tall, beautiful, keep their bodies in good shape, eat clean, drink fine wine have a holiday cottage on an island that is laid back and only those who know, know. I went to Martha's Vineyard once. From my ignorance, felt like that, but it was in the southern states of the USA, on the coast.
So, they have plenty of money, and Colquitt keeps telling us how tall and fit and beautiful and well dressed they are. It is luxury of the elegant, restrained sort, with nothing ostentatious about it, and everyone on their street is of the same kind. Walter is slightly more likable than she is, but I wouldn't want to spend much time with her, beautiful or not.
It's not that Colquitt does anything bad, and she isn't horrible, but I found her hard to like, and I was seeing the whole story through her eyes.
So for a lot of the novel, I kept wondering why such a good author would paint her protagonist like that. Either Siddons had failed to make her likeable, which seemed unlikely given how well drawn everyone else is, or, and I'll admit this was my more uncharitable thought, she moved in that world herself and simply thought this was how people ought to be.
I underestimated her. Oh, yes.
Siddons keeps this characterisation up all the way through the book, and then at the end her craft is revealed, and I realised that I had been wrong to doubt her. I can't say more without spoiling it, but the thing that had irritated me turned out to be entirely deliberate, and it took real discipline to sustain it across a whole novel without once giving the game away. That is superb writing, and she had me fooled.
The structure supports all of this. I thought the first 20% or so felt slow, but there is a triplet construction, with three families moving into the house in turn, and the beginning of the book is mirrored in the end. There is a great symmetry to it, and once you see it you realise how firmly the author was in control from the first page.
A Peculiarly American Haunted House Tradition
The House Next Door also belongs to a particular tradition, the American haunted house, which is a rather different creature from the British one.
If you think of M. R. James, E. F. Benson, or even Algernon Blackwood, the haunted house in those stories is a different thing again, and the Hollywood version is different once more.
I think this great American tradition begins with The Turn of the Screw, which is set in England but was written by an American, so that Bly is really an American haunted house. Then comes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, then Richard Matheson's Hell House, and The House Next Door fits squarely in that line.
What these houses share is that the house itself has agency, but in a way that is not anthropomorphic. We know what it wants to do, which is to destroy, but we never learn why. There is no origin myth, and the book jokes about this, with its references to the Indian burial ground that might have been the house's original sin. But this house isn't built on anything. It isn't a dead grandfather or a vampire or a creature of any kind, and it resists definition. It is a house, and the big question is why these houses are so determined to destroy the people who come to them. I think that is a very American idea.
The very refusal to name, pigeonhole or explain away why a house might be evil, or even how it is evil, seems to me to be the current that runs through these American haunted houses.
So if you're thinking of picking up The House Next Door, I'd say it is slow-ish. Like Hill House and The Turn of the Screw, it is a slow burn and a slow build, but I think that makes it more unsettling in the end. It was a great recommendation, and I'm glad I read it.