The House Next Door (1978) by Anne Rivers Siddons: Colquitt and Walter Kennedy are upper-middle-class semi-twits (demi-twits?) in a posh suburb of Atlanta. On the lot next to them, a young architect plans and builds his first house. A couple moves in. And then things start to go horribly wrong for anyone living in the house and, occasionally, for anyone even remotely connected to anyone living in the house.
But as the Kennedys (make of that last name what you will) joke at one point relatively early in the novel, there's no record of the new house being built on an Indian burial ground or any other such stereotype of ghostly house haunting. It's a new house. And the things that happen could, for the most part, just be a string of increasingly dire coincidences.
Well, up to a point.
Stephen King praised The House Next Door in his early 1980's non-fiction book on horror, Danse Macabre. And it is excellent. Siddons has not, so far as I can tell, ever ventured again into the realm of horror. Pity. Just in terms of the horror elements, she's very good here, avoiding pitfalls that plague many a gifted, committed horror writer.
And as King observed, this is a horror story involving reputation -- the house strikes again and again at the social standing of its inhabitants and their friends. It's a monster devoted to embarrassment, at least initially. But it gets hungrier and more dangerous as the narrative progresses.
Siddons creates a fascinating world of privilege and gossip and extremely reluctant 'heroes.' Just the act of trying to save people from the house brings down embarrassment, loss of social standing, and loss of work on the heads of the Kennedys. In trying to defeat the house, they feed it. And where does the colossal enmity and growing danger of the house come from?
Well, Siddons will answer that last question, sort of, by the end of the novel, in a manner that satisfies while also preserving the mystery of Evil in the world of The House Next Door. This is a deeply satisfying horror novel with finely observed sections of social commentary and satire. Really, a remarkable work, and one of the four or five finest 'Haunted House' novels I've ever had the pleasure to read. Highly recommended.
As with a lot of British writers of horror and horrific science fiction, Herbert shows the mighty influence of John Wyndham in many of his novels, including this one. We regard apocalyptic events from the position of ordinary people who assume roles of importance in the novel. By the end, London (England, natch) comes under attack by a seemingly limitless army of giant rats swarming up from the sewers and subway lines. Think of it as the Return of the Repressed, but with giant, man-eating rats!
However, Herbert is also very much concerned with the plight of the working and lower classes in modern England. This leads to some keenly observed stretches in which those terrible rats attack poor people and others excluded by the traditional power structure, including gays and the mentally ill. The authorities pretty much ignore the terrible fates of these outsiders until the disaster suddenly erupts over everything. As above, so below: by not paying adequate attention to the living conditions of those who are most powerless, the powerful end up facing armageddon.
Ultimately, a schoolteacher from a working class background holds the key to defeating the vast army of giant, hyper-intelligent mutant rats that are the monsters of this particular Herbert novel. The plot moves at a blistering pace, with the disaster fleshed out by the experiences of minor characters other than the protagonist. And the rats -- well, the rats are a great antagonist. And as this is just the first novel in what's generally known as Herbert's Rat Trilogy (to be followed by Lair and Domain), you can be sure that they're a formidable foe. There are many horrific set-pieces of terror, the grotesque, the bloody, and the sad. It's a great, terse horror novel. Highly recommended.
The Fog by James Herbert (1975): The late, prolific, popular horror/thriller writer Herbert throws London under the bus again in his second apocalyptic horror novel. This time around, the horror moves inexorably towards London after being unleashed from the earth by a mysterious, improbable earthquake that devastates a small country town. The monster is...fog! How British is that?
Yes, fog. A growing and seemingly undispersable yellowish cloud of fog prowls the English countryside before heading straight for London. What is it? Where did it come from? Why won't it disperse? An investigator for the Ministry of Environment, having been literally plunged into events while driving through the village during the earthquake, is our protagonist as the forces of the government try to contain the fog.
Why contain it? Because the fog seems to magnify and unleash the worst personality traits of many of those who breathe it for even a few seconds. Rapes, murders, suicides, mass suicides, cannibalism, a guy getting his Johnson cut off with garden shears, a suddenly homicidal group of Hare Krishnas: this fog is a killing machine.
As with Herbert's other apocalyptic novels, scenes of horror and pity contrast with scenes of quiet characterization and a couple of graphic sex scenes. He was certainly an inheritor of the pulp tradition early in his novelistic career, but Herbert also looked with a critical eye on how governments treat the under-privileged and the excluded. His flair for the bloodily horrifying, while certainly a pulp staple, also points in some of its more graphically awful moments towards the rise of Splatterpunk. Highly recommended.
Moon by James Herbert (1985): James Herbert has often been called England's version of Stephen King. This isn't a bad comparison, though King doesn't usually have at least one vaguely soft-core, five-page-long sex scene in almost every novel. The comparison is made more interesting by King's analysis of Herbert's early novels in King's non-fiction horror survey, Danse Macabre.
I've certainly enjoyed the half-dozen or so Herbert novels I've read, and I enjoyed Moon. Herbert's good characters are sympathetic, if occasionally a bit too aesthetically pleasing when they're women (the protagonist's girlfriend is stunningly beautiful...why is this necessary?). Come to think of it, there's a thematic reason it's necessary, one that constitutes a spoiler alert if I explain it further.
Herbert is generally more ruthless than King, or at least more arbitrary when it comes to the question of who dies, and when -- there are a couple of wrenching sequences here that derive a lot of their power from that surprising arbitrariness, and Herbert's decision to not tie certain plot and character threads up neatly.
The plot recalls King's The Dead Zone: protagonist Jonathan Childes has psychic flashes. They once helped him stop a serial killer. But they also made him a media flashpoint when people found out that he was the only useful psychic to ever work on a police investigation. So he moves from England to one of the Southern coastal islands to try to lay low, and to hope that the psychic flashes are a thing of the past. But then horrifying visions start again.
Childes' skepticism about his own powers generates a fair amount of drama as we go along, as do the apparent limits of those powers: he can see what the killer is doing in his mind, but he doesn't know where, and he can't glean the killer's identity from these psychic links. This last becomes quite a problem when the killer suddenly realizes that Childes is psychically observing the killer's actions, and manages to start pulling information out of Childes' head that immediately puts his ex-wife, his daughter, and eventually everyone around Childes in mortal danger. It all makes for a quick, enjoyable read with some moments of visceral and existential horror. Recommended.
