Countdown to Hallowe’en 2016: THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR by Anne Rivers Siddons

Randy’s latest review on our Countdown to Halloween is a classic:

[This house] commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released. It soared into the trees and along the deep-breasted slope of the ridge as though it had uncoiled, not as though it would be built, layer by layer and stone by stone ….I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. … It looked—inevitable.

– from chapter 2, looking at the plans for a new house

I wish we had left then. I wish it more than anything in the world. Perhaps it would have broken the chain if we had not seen. Perhaps by not seeing we could have escaped the strings and webs, the net that has reached out and caught us up. I doubt it, but perhaps it might have been possible, there at the beginning, to get free. Walter doesn’t think so. He thinks we had to see it. We had, after all, been a part of the house, of Buddy and Pie Harralson’s life, from the beginning. Present at the creation, as it were. He thinks we were woven into it then, at the start.

– from chapter 7

Colquitt, our narrator, and Walter Kennedy, are a part of the local society and professional set, members of the club, and frequent hosts and guests of their neighbors, some of whom they number among their closest friends. They are a genteel Southern couple approaching middle-age in the late 1970s, as compatible as folded socks, living a contented upper middle-class life in a prosperous but not ostentatiously wealthy community, their home a sanctuary buffered on one side by an empty lot, home to birds and wild flowers the sight of which soothes them both.

For years the lot remained empty, its odd shape defeating local architects, and then along comes young, pushy, pregnant Pie Harralson and her husband Buddy and their young architect Kim Dougherty and suddenly the lot is infested with workmen and machines and they leave behind a house, a beautiful house that overcomes the Kennedy’s anxieties and even leavens somewhat Pie’s personality.

But as it’s built there are disquieting portents, not least the mangled, crushed bodies of small animals near the new house, and then Walter’s unprecedented jealousy over Kim, and the tragedy that follows is only the first as a force, malignant and subtle seeps into their lives and the lives of the families who own the house next door.

The House Next Door is a novel in four parts as the house has four owners over the course of the story with Colquitt and Walter as witnesses of the gradual destruction of each.

I believe I first heard of Siddons’ novel when reading Danse Macabre by Stephen King (1981) which, among other things, is a discussion of the history of horror in literature and film. In Chapter Nine King discusses ten novels representative of “the horror story as both literature and entertainment, a living part of twentieth-century literature …” and their impact on the genre. The House Next Door is one of the novels and he pairs it with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

Like many before and since, King praises Jackson’s novel. Concerning Siddons’ novel, he expresses reservations about Siddons’ characters, finding Colquitt vain and too class- and money-conscious for him to empathize with, which in the case of this novel he feels muddies character development. But he has some enthusiasm for Siddons’ handling of the historical context needed to make a haunted house work. In most haunted house novels the house is already present, it has a reputation the person entering either knows from the start or learns as the story continues. In The House Next Door the reader gets to see the haunted house built, to watch the events that lead to a reputation, to discover the beginnings of the nature and character of the haunted house. And, for me, that still makes for some powerful reading.

As for King’s reservations on character development, I understand his view (based to some extent on discussion and correspondence with Siddons), but I think there’s an ambiguity in the ending that might undermine his argument: Whatever haunts the house next door preys on the weaknesses of its owners and those who spend time there, and by the end, I’m not sure the Kennedys are the same people they were at the beginning or even exactly who they think they are.

The other novels King chose as, “worthy successors to such books as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmers’s The King in Yellow” (a mistake by King or the typesetter; should read, Chambers’s):
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (usually reissued as Invasion of the Body Snatchers because of the movie’s success)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson (usually reissued as The Incredible Shrinking Man because of the movie’s success)
The Parasite by Ramsey Campbell
The Fog by James Herbert
Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (story collection)