A review by savvylit
Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Loveable characters? No

3.0

Good Neighbors is a tense blend of eco-thriller and suburban horror. What if your neighbors suddenly decided to hate you as a bitumen-spewing sinkhole opens up across the street from your home? Langan explores this question thoroughly, deftly portraying unsettling groupthink and ignored environmental disaster. The neighbors of this novel are genuinely terrifying in an all-too-real way due to their classist hive mind mentality. They make so many assumptions that ultimately cascade and escalate to the point of violence. Langan perfectly understands and reveals the covert hatred that is often seething just under the surface in so-called "good" American neighborhoods.

All that being said, the execution of the plot left me feeling a little hollow. I wanted to love this book for its social commentary. However, the format ultimately keeps it from feeling cohesive. Good Neighbors is interspersed with newspaper clippings from various retrospectives on the events at the heart of its plot. It would seem that these article snippets were included to maintain intrigue and drop clues. Really, though, the snippets took unnecessary focus away from the actual happenings in the plot.

Content Warnings