Sarah Langan's Good Neighbors: My Novel on Replay

Almost at its dead center, not for the first or last time but decidedly, Good Neighbors grabs me by the throat.

A terrible thing has happened, and the easy scapegoat is the family that doesn't quite fit into the society of the Maple Street cul-de-sac, the main stage of the story.

The words come out of a nice enough woman, a progressive even, but in this moment she couldn't be more reactionary. She's explaining why she knows something is dangerous about the new family--the musician in the family has shown his hand. 

"Look at what they come from," she explains to her child. "That song about heroin and cartoons. That's a true story Julia's dad sang, about his own life. That kind of history leaves scars, Charlie. It damages a person. Victims turn into predators . . . I know this from experience . . ."

Near the end of the book, another character has a revelation: "It felt so wonderful, for the briefest of moments, to be known. To be seen for the monster she was, and nonetheless accepted. It was the truest moment of her life."

That moment sustains a feeling that's built over one of the best chapters I've ever read, a chapter filled with physical and emotional risk, physical and emotional pain. Horror and dark beauty builds something like real community out of division and betrayal.

I cannot write about this objectively, yet the book begins and ends with the objective truths that ask us to think about one another and our relationship to each other. The book deals with climate change, a yawning sinkhole threatening to rob all of its characters of everything they have, and it's a book about economic decline, that sinkhole merely the physical manifestation of the block-busting threat when the Wilde family moves in. 

I'm not objective because I grew up as a "victim" who knew, if the world knew my secret, I might be feared as a "predator." This is the part of abuse no one talks about much--the fear of the stigma of being abused. I don't regret it; it's made me who I am, but it's also shaped every relationship in my life and every contribution I make in this life as well.

(I hasten to add that I wasn't abused by my parents....They didn't know. Way more often than not, parents don't know. If you don't think being a parent is terrifying, try doing the job with that perspective.)

It's certainly why I write about the kind of music Arlo Wilde makes, songs of heroin and cartoons and secrets cried out loud. My shorthand for that is "rock," but every music of the cultural explosion that's taken place in America has some element of what I call "rock" in it.

That's also why I write, and have written about, something I call "horror," a form ill-defined and even worse understood.

Monsters and music have long been my beat, and Good Neighbors gets at the why and the how of both of those things. The truest moments of our life come from our darkest secrets, and the acceptance of those dark truths in one another is the only way we find and build anything like real community, the sort of community that might survive a collapsing world. 

For that reason and many more, I love this book. I believe in these people, and I like spending time with them, especially the children, and that only happens when a story gets kids right and knows what it takes for the kids to be all right. Like all my favorite art, this book roots itself in an unflinching observation of truths that haunt us but also offers us a means to an open heart, a way forward. 

When I finish books, I often use that afterglow to pick up another, hoping the new book will sustain the thrill of the community and discovery I just left. This time, I simply went back to page one. It feels like a record I just want to play over and over and over, for all the reasons above.