THE NEIGHBORHOOD

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.