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THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Name: THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Author: Ed Borowsky

by Ed Borowsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A steady mix of weird and creepy makes for an effective, if unpolished, thriller.

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A retiree faces off against his eccentric neighbors in this novel.

At the age of 53, Andrew Lelling, who is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, has been forced into early retirement. He and his younger wife, Emily, are struggling financially after the failure of his startup business. They move from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, to Quail Run at Misty Hollow Lake, a housing development in Florida. Along with an infestation of citrus rats and scabies-covered Spanish moss, their new house is surrounded by peculiar neighbors, from the too-friendly swinger couple Richard and Pattie Conway to Betty Desantis and her ever-changing grandchildren and the Vietnam veteran Capt. Craig Blackwell, with his paranoid wife and a violent pair of German shepherds. All of them share an odd connection to Russell Kluger, a lawyer with designs on Emily. Spurred on by constantly barking dogs and their troubled marriage, Andrew and Emily are sucked into an organization called The One, seemingly a cult that worships a giant alligator kept in the lake, holds orgies, and sacrifices members in order to sell their organs and continue to fund depraved activities. Andrew wonders if he deserves the dark turn his life has taken. Past memories and the voice of Big Beth, a woman from his teens with the mind of a child, whom he and his friends took advantage of for sex, haunts his dreams, urging him to strike against The One. Borowsky’s novel is a legitimately unsettling thriller, embracing the Satanic Panic genre with a modern twist, integrating disturbing imagery with positively Floridian touches of oddball retirees and human sacrifices utilizing pool noodles. The cast is impressive. The redneck child eaters and yuppie sex addicts are obviously the frightening stars of the show, but lesser characters like a foul-mouthed exterminator and a duo of gossipy, choruslike librarians help convey the necessary exposition and add to the story’s absurd charm. The book overall is pretty rough; inconsistent punctuation and characters’ names sometimes spelled differently distract from the tale. And as visions of Big Beth begin to torment Andrew, it becomes more difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually happening.

A steady mix of weird and creepy makes for an effective, if unpolished, thriller.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 259

Publisher: Manuscript

Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

THRILLER | SUSPENSE

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YOU'D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST

by Joanna Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

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Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.

While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780143136170

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

Categories:

GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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DAUGHTER OF MINE

by Megan Miranda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024

Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.

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The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.

When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”

Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.