I loved the sturdy chuckle of the creek, the nearness of the woods,” muses Colquitt as she desolately watches the tractors destroy in order to build. True, before the house was built the “lot” was ”an oasis of wild, dark greenness, luminous in the Spring with dogwood and honeysuckle, giving one the feeling of being cloistered on a mountain. If you’re looking for an answer as to why, this book won’t tell you (although a possible line of thinking to follow is suggested, and no, it hasn’t been built on an Indian burial ground). Colquitt and Walter watch in horror what befalls the three different families who move into the house next door. The chapters/parts in the book are simply titled: The Harralsons, The Sheehans, The Greenes. “Don’t you just love it?” The newly married and hopeful Mrs. You said once Colquitt, that it would bring out the best in whoever lived there. “I know what happened, I understand now,” he says to Walter and Colquitt one dark night over a cocktail (as in one of the seminal and unique movies about white suburbanites “The Swimmer,” everyone seems to always be drinking their disillusionments away). Kim, despite his architect ego, is the first to attempt to verbalize the grave dangers of his creation after he has a disturbing scene there that nearly destroys three lives in one shot. Toward the midpoint of the book the couple knows with utter certainty that something is terribly wrong with the house but don’t yet understand or know what to do. 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.” These words are spoken by Colquitt, the narrator, who lives next door with her husband Walter. It was obvious that he was a good architect.” And create, he does: “The house lay in a pool of radiance, as if spotlit. The house is designed by Kim, an up and coming architect prodigy who “drank steadily and silently, and regarded his new clients with both faint amusement and a sort of unwilling tolerance. The control that you have over your life is really just an illusion. Perhaps it is more a haunted house for adults (although children are harmed there, too), one that reminds you that the life you have carefully built can shatter at any time.

The haunted house in Anne Rivers Siddons’ chiller “The House Next Door” isn’t your usual haunted house of rattling chains and ghosts.

The house next door anne rivers