Even so, The House Next Door is an exquisite horror novel.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 16:18:46 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA115512 Boxid_2 CH120121101-BL1 Camera Canon 5D City New York Donor One caveat: some people find the ending a false note that mars the effect. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. 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.

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. 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.'

It is an extension of ourselves it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her. She told him, 'The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. 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. 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. 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. The setting is a wealthy suburb in Atlanta where an ambitious young architect is building a dramatically contemporary house. 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 house next door anne rivers