Good Neighbors: A Novel

This reading group guide for Good Neighbors includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Sarah Langan. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world.

But menace skulks beneath the surface of this exclusive enclave, making its residents prone to outrage. When the Wilde family moves in, they trigger their neighbors’ worst fears. Dad Arlo’s a gruff has-been rock star with track marks. Mom Gertie’s got a thick Brooklyn accent, with high heels and tube tops to match. Their weird kids cuss like sailors. They don’t fit with the way Maple Street sees itself.

Though Maple Street’s Queen Bee, Rhea Schroeder—a lonely college professor repressing a dark past—welcomed Gertie and her family at first, relations went south during one spritzer-fueled summer evening, when the new best friends shared too much, too soon. By the time the story opens, the Wildes are outcasts.

As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes. Suddenly, it is one mom’s word against the other’s in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood.

A riveting and ruthless portrayal of American suburbia, Good Neighbors excavates the perils and betrayals of motherhood and friendships and the dangerous clash between social hierarchy, childhood trauma, and fear.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Before tragedy strikes on Maple Street, Julia and Shelly have a growing friendship. Other than the circumstance of being neighbors, what do you think bonds the girls together? Discuss what they have in common.

2. A parallel friendship is that of Julia’s and Shelly’s mothers, Gertie and Rhea. How does the arc of the mothers’ friendship mirror that of their daughters’? How does it differ?

3. The suburban setting of Good Neighbors is integral to the book itself. How does Sarah Langan describe Maple Street? What are its physical characteristics? How do these characteristics influence the neighbors who live there? Do you think this novel could have been set anywhere other than a wealthy suburb?

4. Maple Street is in the middle of two environmental crises: a heatwave and a sinkhole. Why do you think the author chose to incorporate very physical emergencies into the internal emergencies the characters experience in the novel?

5. What typically suburban, idyllic summertime activities are distorted by the sinkhole and its surrounding tragedies? Would you consider Good Neighbors satirical?

6. Discuss the author’s choice to include book excerpts and newspaper articles throughout the book. Did you feel this was an effective storytelling technique? Did any of the characters’ fates surprise you?

7. What qualities make the Wildes good scapegoats for the problems on Maple Street? Why do the longtime residents of the street believe the rumors about the Wildes so readily?

8. Almost every resident of Maple Street hides a secret. What are the neighbors’ attitudes about keeping or revealing secrets? What does it say about their characters?

10. Was there one character or family in the neighborhood whose story most intrigued you? How did your opinions change as you learned more about them?

11. While gossip may have fueled many of the plot’s shocking events, all of the rumors and whispers stem from fear. Discuss what you think each of the main characters fears. What are the collective fears of the neighborhood? How is fear expressed on Maple Street?

12. Do you feel that Shelly receives justice by the end of the novel?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Sarah Langan has written several horror novels, including Audrey’s Door and The Missing. Choose one of Sarah’s other novels to read, and compare and contrast it with Good Neighbors.

2. Good Neighbors has been compared to works by authors Celeste Ng and Shirley Jackson. Choose one of the novels or short stories by these writers and discuss what it has in common with Sarah Langan’s novel.

3. With its evocative setting, plot twists, and large cast of characters, Good Neighbors feels perfect for a TV series or a film. Who would you cast in it? What elements of the novel do you think would be challenging to portray on screen?

A Conversation with Sarah Langan

When did you decide you wanted to include fictional newspaper articles and book excerpts about the “Maple Street Murders” in your novel? Why did you feel you needed to include an outside point of view among the many other points of view in the novel?

I’ve always liked adding texture to my stories by inventing primary and secondary sources. It gives the work a context. I wrote a whole bunch of articles for my novel Audrey’s Door, too. In that book, I had a lot of fun writing a fake New Yorker article about a thinly veiled Spalding Gray. I also invented a religion and architectural philosophy that I pretended was real and blogged about. I didn’t intend to trick anybody; I thought readers would think it was funny. So, on speaking engagements, I’d say, “Guys, I made it up.” And sometimes readers would say, “No. It’s real. I read about it on the internet.”

With Good Neighbors, I hadn’t planned on including other sources—I thought I was writing a straight horror novel like The Missing. But somewhere along the line, it stopped being horror, and I realized I wanted to provide a wider context for what I was doing.

What I like about citing made-up articles and books is that it allows me to provide a context for my work. It also makes my story mythic within the world it inhabits. In that way, it feels more real, like it could happen in this America, too. So, I was shooting for that. I was hoping that by mentioning Broadway and other touchstones, that the story would feel less like fiction.

What elements of suburban horror were you most excited to explore?

I tend not to think about what I’m doing most of the time, or why I’m doing it. But I think the main driver for me had less to do with suburbia than the impact of Facebook on real people. I was trying to understand how and why this weird medium had caused so much damage. And it has done real damage, not just to our political system, but to our culture and to our human relationships. We’ve become very polarized, not for real reasons, but for invented reasons, and those inventors are cashing in.

As I was working on this story, I was also interested in the personal blind spots we all developed in childhood, to survive. As adults, these coping mechanisms no longer work, and are, in fact, harmful. Rhea’s forgetfulness, her tendency to block things out, was surely helpful while she shared a house with a blackout alcoholic. But as an adult, those same coping mechanisms are disastrous. She knows this on some level, but she’s terrified of letting go of the only behavior that ever protected her. Worse, if she does let go, she’ll have to confront the reason it exists in the first place—her dad was a mess. Her childhood was horrible.

There are many unsettling scenes full of bad decisions, cruelty, and fear. Did you ever feel stressed out writing them?

In supernatural horror, these scenes are easier because there’s a monster driving the bad behavior. The characters who commit violent acts are not 100% responsible. Even when it’s bad guys doing bad things, we can excuse them because the world has gone mad and is filled with monsters. They’ve lost their marbles, and this is all cartoonish allegory, anyway.

In this book, there was no monster. There were just people. I had sympathy for all of them. I knew how I wanted this book to end, and getting there was very hard. This will read as strange, but I have a very tough time believing in bad people. So I had to figure out the exact, very rare circumstances where the story you’re holding could happen in a realistic way. In other words, I believe that 25 percent of the time, Gertie and Rhea would have stayed friends, learned from each other, and become better people and parents. Another 25 percent of the time they’d have drifted apart. About 24 percent of the time they’d have had an icy separation. And 1 percent of the time, some variant on the plot of Good Neighbors happens.

But the thing is, that rare 1 percent has enlarged in the age of social media.

We’re all expected to voice opinions on issues we often know nothing about, and then we’re expected to fight over those opinions. For reasons I cannot fathom, it’s now socially acceptable to condemn each other online—to condemn strangers and friends and politicians and celebrities. To wish them dead and call them stupid. To go after their families and their jobs and their appearances, all in the name of moral righteousness.

Regarding queasiness in my portrayals of Very Bad Things, the one character I should mention here is Shelly. Abuse is gross, and I didn’t like writing about it. Along those lines, I was also concerned about depicting a false accusation of a rape, as I did not want anyone coming away from this and saying: Look! Guys like Harvey Weinstein got a bad rap! They did not get a bad rap. They ruined a whole lot of lives because something sick inside them was allowed to grow. As I hope we’re all aware, false accusations are rare. True accusations of rape are horribly common.

What came first: The idea for the slightly supernatural sinkhole or the idea for the toxic neighbor relationships? Or were they part and parcel of the same concept?

I started with an asteroid, actually! But a novelist friend suggested it should be a sinkhole. In the early versions of this story, something supernatural comes out from the hole and starts infecting the neighbors, activating their baser natures. In that version of the book, I was skewering the way we perceive identity as defined by appearance, gender, and economics. But I could never get traction on how things ought to turn out in the end, mostly because I couldn’t figure out anything new to say. It was kind of boring, having monsters attack people—the emotional stakes didn’t mean as much to me.

I had known for some time that I should eliminate everything supernatural. There was a different story that wanted to be told, and it was calling to me. I had this picture of a family under too much pressure, and specifically, I saw Julia on a precipice, in danger. And Shelly, lost, falling backward. So, I cut about half my characters, and I made a human monster out of Rhea Schroeder. I made the plot about this single relationship gone wrong, and the sinkhole switched from being a pretext for horror to a kind of Geiger counter for the bonkers psychological state of Maple Street.

I keep using the word I, but I was not alone. My agent, Stacia Decker,...