Sarah Langan – Memphis Flyer

Lil Nas X, the rapper who rocked boats by blending hip-hop and country music in “Old Town Road,” seems to have ushered in a renaissance of the Satanic Panic with the angels-and-demons iconography in the music video for the recently released “Montero (Call Me by Your Name).” If, like me, you have evangelical aunts and uncles with access to the internet, you know that the video is a sure sign that Satan is real and he’s out to get the children.

Well, if we have to do the Satanic Panic again, at least we have books to go with it. Clay McLeod Chapman’s Whisper Down the Lane (Quirk Books), released this Tuesday, could hardly be more timely. What’s more, Chapman will discuss the novel online tonight (Thursday, April 8th) via webinar as part of Novel bookstore’s Reader Meet Writer series of events.

The book alternates between chapters set in 1983 and in 2013, following young Sean and the fully grown Richard. But Sean and Richard are the same person, 30 years and a scandal apart and after a name change to give young Sean/Richard some chance at a semblance at a normal life. But it seems, as Satanic imagery begins to pop up at the elementary school where Richard teaches, that his past has come back to haunt him.

There are shades of The Crucible in Whisper Down the Lane, making it an excellent companion novel to Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors, published earlier this year. The novel centers around the ease with which the seed of a lie can take root and grow and thrive. The most true-to-life moments are young Sean’s interactions with his single mother, and how her unmarried status makes her a pariah. Her stress, her absolute need to never make a mistake because the eyes of the community are always on her, and the panic that fosters in Sean, felt true and tragic.

Chapman crafts a horrific tragedy, built on misunderstandings and the best intentions. The novel is all the more compelling for its lack of an obvious villain. Of course, there’s no reason to take my word for it.
Clay McLeod Chapman discusses Whisper Down the Lane online via Novel bookstore’s Reader Meet Writer series, Thursday, April 8th, at 6 p.m. The event is free with registration.

This week’s column faces me with a happy predicament — how to write critically about a book I unequivocally loved? Some novels are puzzle boxes, devices of impossible intricacy meant to delight the intellect. Some take a different form — a raw, beating heart, oozing pathos and humanity. Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors (Simon & Schuster) is both things, and more. It wrecked me, left me in tears twice, and if the past three days are any indication, Good Neighbors will live rent-free in my mind for a long time to come.

When the novel opens, the Wilde family has already worn out its welcome on suburban Maple Street. It isn’t anything they did, exactly. Sure, they could stand to take better care of their lawn, but it’s really about who they are.

Arlo Wilde, charting-musician-turned-office-supply-salesperson, with monster-movie-themed tattoos covering his track marks, likes to sit on the front porch and burn through packs of Parliaments. Gertie freezes up in social situations, leaving a big, fake smile on her face, a remnant from her beauty pageant days. She wears cheap jewelry, and her shirts are cut too low. Larry, their youngest, is going through a phase — he’s bright, but socially, he’s developing slowly. And poor Julia, pimply and pubescent, had to move to a new town at life’s most awkward stage, and now finds herself trying to fit in with a group of kids who’ve known each other since before they could speak.

As a family, the Wildes are damaged but brave, ever attempting to rise above hidden scars far more grisly than Arlo’s track marks.

David Zaugh, Zaugh Photography

Sarah Langan

When the novel begins, with a Fourth of July block party, Maple Street’s de facto leader Rhea Schroeder is on the outs with Gertie, ostensibly her best friend. In fact, both the Wilde women are feuding with the Schroeders, it seems, as there’s friction between Julia and Rhea’s daughter, Shelly. That drama is upstaged, though, when a sinkhole opens up in the park that borders the neighborhood. Ominous, hinting at hidden dangers, it spews candy-apple-scented fumes, a clear indication that something deadly lurks, hidden, under Maple Street.

Somehow, about a month after the novel’s beginning, the resentment bubbling under the surface of Maple Street overflows and leads to a series of murders. Good Neighbors makes no bones about that — each page takes the reader inexorably closer to catastrophe.

Langan could teach a master class in suspense. She peppers the plot with interstitial chapters taken from “real-life” newspaper clippings, articles, and Hollywood Babylon-style books about the infamous Maple Street Murders. As a result, every plot point feels tragically inevitable.

“There’s this thing that happens to people who’ve grown up with violence. It changes their hardwiring,” Langan writes. “They don’t react to threats like regular civilians. They do extremes. They’re too docile over small things but they go apeshit over the big stuff. In other words, they’re prone to violence.”

Langan lays out her pieces with a watchmaker’s precision, setting up the circumstances that lead to the Maple Street Murders. What’s terrifying is how common those circumstances turn out to be. In Good Neighbors, they’re newish neighbors who don’t quite fit in, a sinkhole, an oppressive and record-breaking heatwave, a tanked economy (glimpsed in the margins), a worsening environmental crisis, and a family with secrets. It’s generational trauma and PTSD and a community, a microcosm of America, struggling under the weight of these intersectional crises.

In other words, it could happen here, too.
Novel at Home: Sarah Langan with Grady Hendrix, authors in conversation in live online launch party for Good Neighbors, Tuesday, February 2nd, at 6 p.m. Event is free with registration.