The holocaust that never happened

An article by NSFWG member Paul Melhuish

Channel 4 recently showed the series The 100. The premise being that 97 years ago life on Earth was wiped out by a nuclear holocaust but some humans sat it out in a space station orbiting the Earth. Now they’ve sent down a group of young criminals to investigate and see if the radiation count has dropped. What they find are mutant creatures and primitive tribes.

Watching this brought me back to the sort of stories I enjoyed in my youth. In the Eighties the threat of nuclear war was real. My childhood seemed to be spent watching Protect and Survive adverts shown on the news but when What-if-the-bomb-dropped? drama Threads was aired on BBC1 in 1984 the reality of nuclear war became clearer. Yes, it was a scary prospect but it was also kind of exiting. I went with the belief that it wouldn’t happen anyway. Well, it didn’t, did it.

The holocaust that never happened  played  huge role in the sci-fi literature, television programmes and films that I was watching at the time. Other apocalypses were possible such as mass blindness as seen in Day of the Triffids or a plague envisioned in Survivors but Nuclear War was the most probable and possible threat at the time.

One of my most enduring memories of holocaust fiction, apart from Threads, is the TV adaptation of  the novel by Robert C. O’Brian,  Z for Zachariah. A young girl is left alone in a Welsh valley that is somehow immune to radiation then a man arrives with plans to seed a new society. The Girl, Ann, understandably isn’t too keen to make babies with some beardy stranger so leaves taking his radiation suit with her.

The other holocaust story that I remember vividly is James Herbert’s Domain. The third instalment of his hugely popular Rats series. The bomb drops and the rats come out to have gnaw. The story follows a group of survivors as they make their way through a wrecked London. Also worth reading is Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.  America is nuked and an immortal force of evil walks the wasteland causing trouble. Think Stephen King’s The Stand but with a higher rad count. These are examples of apocalyptic fiction that describes a world just after the bomb had dropped. Fuel for the imagination seemed to come from trying to visualise life decades, or even centuries, after the holocaust.

So prevalent was the bomb that most sci-fi didn’t even need to mention the holocaust by name. Think of the end scene in Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston finds the statue of liberty on the shore and we all know what’s happened. Interestingly in the new Apes film it’s a global pandemic which nearly wipes us out, a possibly more relevant apocalypse for this day and age.

John Wyndham’s The Crysalids is set many years after the apocalypse. Humanity has reverted to theocracy and there are tribes of mutants out in the wastelands, banished by the religious ‘normal’ society. The religious society has the now nearly iconic phrase Thou Shall Watch for the Mutant.

By 1989 the iron curtain had collapsed. The threat of nuclear war decreased. Science fiction moved on and with the emergence of the digital age other concepts occupied sci-fi’s storylines such as virtual reality. However, the possibility of nuclear war never really went away.

In 2007 whilst at unit I showed by flatmates Threads. These guys were all in their early twenties and are too young to remember Protect and Survive or Maggie Thatcher. I thought they might find it cheesy and retro. By the end they were watching through their fingers, horrified. Of course, the nuclear threat it no less real today. The tragic events in Ukraine over the past few weeks have set the US and Russia at loggerheads again. In 2002 India and Pakistan were at the point of war, both countries are nuclear capable.

In The 100 it’s not made clear what caused the holocaust but as Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘You can’t dis-invent the bomb’. Perhaps it isn’t as forgotten as we think it is.

This article originally appeared on Paul's website here

Railgun recoil: Newton won’t be denied!, an article by Tim C. Taylor

In his last post for the blog, NSFWG member Tim C. Taylor wrote about the creep of technobabble into TV and movie Sci-Fi, and why he wanted more believability in my written fiction (which you can read here).  This time, he looks at more technology.

Back in the early 80s, I used to design ships as part of the game, Traveller. And then I designed how the elements of a multi-ship force would work together for the game expansion called Trillion Credit Squadron (anyone still play that?) Typical ship armaments included meson cannons, pulse lasers and railguns.

Science fiction is fast becoming science fact. It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s happening in my lifetime. One of those exotic theoretical space weapons, railguns, looks likely become the main medium-range ship weapon for the US Navy over the next 20 years. They are already planning how to retrofit existing ships with enough electrical power in readiness.

Armed with a whole load of real technical data on railguns, they were a pick for my weapons in the Human Legion universe. (A special thanks goes out to all those dads who filmed their children’s railgun science projects).

So, what is a railgun?

To make one, you take two parallel rails made from an electrical conductor (such as copper) and wire them up to a direct current supply. Place another conductor to touch both rails. This armature, as it’s called, must be able to move along the rails. When you supply the electrical power, a magnetic field is induced in the rails which pushes the armature along until it falls off the end of the rails, which breaks the electrical circuit.

In a school science project, the rails might be strips of aluminum foil taped to a board and the armature a steel bar that gently rolls along the board.

Real ones look might use a conducting sabot for the armature. A sabot is a jacket that wraps around a shell or bullet, enabling it to be fired more effectively. Search the ground after one of the fight scenes in my Human Legion books and you will be wading through spent sabot casings.

Anyway, back to Traveller and railguns. When I was designing heavy cruisers after school back in the 80s I used to imagine that when a railgun fired you would hear a hum of power build up followed by a whoosh. No bang. I expected it was recoilless too. Maybe that was because there was no explosive charge. With no exploding gases required to push the projectile along a barrel, there would be no recoil pushing back on the gun breech. Right?

Turns out I was wrong on all counts. It seems obvious to me now, but I knew a lot less physics when I was 13, and my misconceptions have stuck with me,

If you watch videos of real railgun test firings [such as this US Navy video below] there is a big bang when it fires. Lots of sound and lots of light. That’s what happens when you suddenly discharge a huge amount of power in an enclosed space, but it is not a chemical explosion as with conventional munitions. You don’t have all those hot, expanding gases pushing back against the breech. So does a railgun have less recoil than a conventional gun?


The answer is that it has exactly the same recoil.

Take a projectile of the same mass and push it out of a barrel at the same muzzle velocity and it will push back on the breech with the same recoil force. Whether that projectile is propelled by a chemical explosion or by electrical repulsion makes absolutely no difference. (Actually, I am simplifying slightly — recoil isn’t all felt in one go. See http://www.positiveshooting.com/RecoilMain.html.)

It’s all to do with the law of conservation of momentum. It’s the same law that makes rockets fly into space. Also… It’s a basic law of the universe that you can’t get around by waving a technobabble phrase.

So in going for believability, conservation of momentum is something I can’t ignore.

The Universe is a Conservative Place

There are many conservation laws of the Universe. These say that if can draw a ring a bunch of stuff (the technical term for this is a ‘system’) and promise not to influence that system from the outside, then a host of basic properties of that system must stay the same.

The law we’re interested in here is conservation of (linear) momentum.

What’s a system? Well, a railgun is one, the balls on a pool table are nearly another, but we’re going to start with a bomb.  I’m talking about the kind of bomb beloved of terrorists and revolutionaries of the late 19th century. The kind that somehow has become a thing of amusement today.  That bomb is a system.  We’ve lit the fuse. It’s going to blow, so you’d better take cover.

BANG!

Bits of bomb casing fly out in all directions.  Each fragment has mass and velocity. Momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, so each fragment has momentum.  There are dozens of fragments, each with its own momentum. There’s a whole lot of momentum going on here. Except…

Hold on a moment!

Conservation of momentum says that the momentum of our bomb system must not change unless we act on that system from the outside. And to start with, the bomb is at rest. Its momentum is zero.

So the momentum must still be zero after the explosion.

Yet the fragments are not at rest.

The answer to our conundrum is that momentum is mass times velocity. And velocity is not the same as speed: velocity always has a direction.

Back to our bomb. If we add up the momentum of all the exploding fragments, we will see them start to cancel out. For example, if we have a fragment flying out to the left side of the page and a fragment of equal mass and speed going right, then the combined momentum of those two parts is zero.

And that’s what we get with our bomb system. The momentum starts off as zero, and after the explosion the net momentum of the system remains zero at all times, even though individual parts of our system do acquire momentum.

Now let’s move to railguns…

BTW: if the bomb starts off on the floor, then the ground will push back on the bomb fragments, interacting with our system. So just imagine the bomb is actually in outer space and then it really is isolated from any external force.

Consider all the parts of our railgun to be one system, just as we did earlier with the bomb. That’s the breech, barrel, projectile, capacitors to store electrical charge, sabot, the firing button and anything else we need.

Now assume the gun is at rest. That means the momentum of our system is zero.

We press the firing button.

The result is something like this:


We know what’s happening here because we’ve just seen that with our bomb.

The projectile flies out with huge momentum.

Now, if the railgun system was as truly isolated as our bomb (let’s assume floating in deep space) then the gun would move backward with sufficient speed to cancel out the momentum of the projectile. It will leave net momentum as zero (which is what rocket engines do).

The cue ball hits, knocking balls everywhere. But the net momentum stays (very nearly) the same

A practical railgun fired on a planet’s surface isn’t an isolated system, though. It doesn’t fly backward. Something pushes back very hard to cancel out the momentum of the projectile.

That’s what recoil really is. It’s the practical implication of the gun trying to fly backward with an equal and opposite momentum to the projectile.

Or, if you like, it’s our way of defining our gun system so that it is not in isolation. We add a gun carriage, tripod, or a rifleman, Navy ship, or some other mechanism that is ultimately braced against the Earth’s surface.

Recoil is complicated and we can engineer tricks to manage recoil, but we can’t change the law of conservation of momentum. Which is why my teenage idea of spaceship railguns was wrong, and why the recoil force acting on the breech of a railgun is exactly the same as for a conventional (chemical propellant) gun firing a projectile of the same mass and velocity.

BTW: Imagine our railgun is mounted on a spaceship or space station. That’s a very different proposition. There’s no planet to push back against to resist the recoil. The spacecraft’s momentum will change to cancel out the momentum of the projectile.

In my Human Legion books, I’m after believability rather than science lessons. So I wanted to learn more about the practical experience of recoil, and design some of that into weapons such as the standard Marine weapon, the SA-71 carbine.

Designers of real-life rifles, for example, can lessen and use the recoil by diverting expanding gases to expel the spent round and chamber the next one. But if the gun system is not to fly backward something must still push hard against the breech.

With a rifle, that would traditionally be the firer’s shoulder.

And it’s important we get this bracing right, because it is accurate bullets that kill the enemy, not volume of fire. And if the firer can’t control the recoil, they can’t fire accurately. (The very earliest siege cannon teams knew this better than anyone: the recoil from each fire would damage the gun carriage, meaning they had to rebuild it each time. Two shots a day was a respectable rate of fire)

One of the weapons experts I consulted was my father. During the 50s, he faced off against the Russians in the Cold War. The rifle he used was the First World War issue .303 Lee-Enfield. You quickly learned how to hold the Lee-Enfield properly, he told me, because even when held correctly, every time you fired, it hurt!

He much preferred the Bren gun, a light machine gun design from the 1930s that he qualified for as a marksman (I think light might be better called ‘portable’ — they weren’t light if you carried one any distance). He said that when braced on its bipod, you couldn’t feel the recoil, and this helped to make it an extremely accurate weapon. He could put a bullet through a mug at 100 yards every time. (I think his eyesight was better back in the 50s).

The Bren used gas venting, springs, and other clever tricks to reduce the experience of recoil to near zero. The law of conservation of momentum still holds for the Bren, but if they could reduce the recoil experience so much in the 1930s, they can certainly do much better centuries later in my Human Legion books.

So there you have my journey through both railgun physics and a little practical understanding of recoil.

The SA-71 carbine is the standard personal weapon of the Human Legion, and their predecessor/ rivals, the Human Marine Corps, My starting point for its design was the Bren Gun. But the Bren Gun wasn’t designed for space combat, compatibility with stealth suits, and carrying an immense electrical charge. So, having paid homage to the law of conservation of momentum, when working out these other features, I allowed myself a little more flexibility.

And that is what I like other writers to be doing. By limiting the techno-babble, and with at least an acknowledgement of real-life physics, as a reader I’m much more ready to go with the flow of all the more fanciful future technology.

I’m happy to report that having read plenty of military sci-fi this past year, other authors are doing us proud. In fact, believability in future weapons and, to some degree, combat tactics, has been greatly improved by the introduction of so many self-published books.

To say amateurs are beating the pros seems strange, but I think it is because so many new self-published writers have military backgrounds, or go do their research first.

Mind you, there is still a tendency for spaceship lasers to have range limitations that make no sense (the effective range of lasers in vacuum is determined by diffraction). And Marines of the far future still tend to carry bolt-action rifles.

But that’s just minor niggles.

Whether you’re reading, writing or both: military science fiction is a great place to be right now.


This article originally appeared, in two parts, at Tim's website which can be found here

BSFA Awards Deadline Approaches…

a message from NSFWG member Donna Scott, on behalf of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA)

If you're a member of the BFSA, you are eligible to nominate for the BSFA Awards.  This is a membership only nominations system and these are your Awards..

I am writing now to ask you to raise awareness that the nominations period closes on 31st January.

The BSFA committee met in December and discussed our objectives with the award.  We want the BSFA Award (and the BSFA itself) to represent the full range of the genre and the diversity of talent and ability behind those working across the spectrum of short fiction, novels, art and nonfiction. Our starting point is to make sure that the suggestions list is as complete and representative of the best work as possible.

Please consider using your nominations.  You’ll see that this year we’ve asked people to put forward four nominations per category for the Awards and then click on this link to add to the recommendations section as well.

This is designed to promote as many authors and artists as possible.

If our Awards are going to reflect the best in SF published in Britain in 2014, then we need members to actively help to promote that quality. We hope you will support our aims.

It could well be that many of our members are biding their time, but we’d really like to hear from you. Everyone is just as qualified as everyone else to make their nominations.

Lastly, for your information, the rules are:

Nominations are restricted to four per category.

Nominations shall open in October each year and run to January 31st.
A minimum of three nominations will be required for a work to be
included on the ballot; if there are fewer than three works achieving
this level of support, the category will not be awarded.
You may not make multiple nominations for a single work.
Please do not nominate your own work.
Find out more about how to nominate here:

The deadline for nominations is 31st January 2015.

* * *

The BSFA was initiated by a group of fans in 1958, and was soon established and run as an official national body by readers, authors, booksellers and publishers with the aim of appreciating and encouraging science fiction in every form.  Many famous authors, critics, editors and publishers have been members through its history and many more continue to be today. Being a member of the BSFA puts you in touch with like-minded people across the country and beyond; whilst linking you to a rich tradition and enabling you to contribute to a vibrant future.

Characters Must Eat (part 2), by Ian Watson

- the second article on food from Group Chairman Ian Watson, following his popular post last November (which you can find here)

Following on from Napoleon's famous chicken, we have Napoleon's nemesis putting in the boot...

Beef Wellington
According to a British Earl memorialising 20 years of conversations with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769 - 1852), Wellington´s favourite meat was mutton, not beef; and when at war he often notoriously only ate cold meat and bread (however, the Sandwich had already been christened...) so attaching the name of the commander who beat Napoleon at Waterloo to beef in puff pastry may have played a victorious British trump to Napoleon´s propagandist Chicken Marengo—a robust rosbif reply to the stylish caprices of French cuisine even though it stole an existing French filet de bœuf en croûte.

After service in India, Wellesley rose to prominence during the campaign against Napoleon in Portugal and Spain, became British ambassador in Paris (and the first Duke of Wellington) following Napoleon´s fall, then finally put paid to Napoleon in 1815 with Prussian help after the escape from Elba.  Wellington became one of the few Prime Ministers to fight a duel while in office, and famously responded to a greedy prospective publisher of memoirs by a former mistress with: "Publish and be damned!"  Wellington certainly devised the boot named after him, and sliced Beef Wellington can somewhat resemble a battlefield amputation of a booted leg.  Like Chicken Marengo its contents can vary—to salmon, to sausagemeat, and to lamb which would probably have pleased the "Iron Duke" best.

Which we follow with beef completely uncooked and unbooted in the form of:

Carpaccio
During the 1920s the manager of the fashionable Hotel Europa in Venice encouraged his waiter Giuseppe Cipriani to become a barman, since Giuseppe was good with languages and with people.  Thus Giuseppe became well acquainted with a young man from Boston, Harry Pickering, who was in Venice with his aunt, trying to overcome alcoholism—mainly by spending time in the hotel bar.  However, Harry quarreled with his aunt and she left Italy, taking her cheque book with her.  Giuseppe took the risk of lending Harry 10,000 Lire ($5000 at the time).  In 1931 surprisingly Harry reappeared and repayed Giuseppe 50,000 Lire, so that Giuseppe could open his own bar, for which "Harry´s Bar" might be a good name.

Giuseppe converted part of a rope warehouse, at the end of a cul-de-sac so that only select clients would patronise it, not just passers-by; and soon the guest book held the signatures of Toscanini, Marconi, Charlie Chaplin amongst many of the rich and famous, while habitué Hemingway boosted Harry´s Bar in his writings.  In 1950 Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo stopped by and told Giuseppe that her doctor wouldn´t allow her to eat cooked meat.  So Giuseppe elegantly served thinly sliced raw beef, and named the dish after the Venetian painter Vittorio Carpaccio (1465 - 1525), since Giuseppe had just seen a major exhibition and been struck by Carpaccio´s fondness for the colour red in his exquisitely detailed paintings.

Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas

...from all of us at the Northampton Speculative Fiction Writers Group to the readers of this blog.

Happy Christmas and our best wishes for the New Year.

The blog - with its usual eclectic mixture of articles, news and various lists - will be back in January, with a round-up of the year from co-chairman Ian Whates.

See you in 2015!

Shoes, Ships and Cadavers (or, "an ebook is a perfect gift!")

Do you have a speculative fiction fanatic in your family?

Are you friends with someone who loves reading science-fiction, fantasy or horror?

With Christmas just around the corner, are they looking for something new to read?

May we suggest...

Shoes, Ships and Cadavers
Tales from North LondonshireThe Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group
Introduction by Alan Moore

Northampton:
A town that sits at the heart of England. A town that has played host to kings, saints, parliament, public hangings, and hot air balloons. A place steeped in history, laden with mystery, and bursting with wonders just waiting to be realised.

Let us be your guides...

“The writers represented in Shoes, Ships & Cadavers: Tales from North Londonshire have crafted visions of the town that are distinct and separate, covering a generous and sweeping arc of this tiny and yet deceptively expansive area of spacetime… I read this in a single sitting, something that I can’t remember managing with an anthology for a considerable while. I don’t expect to read a book this year that is more personally satisfying or a greater cause for optimism. Passionately recommended.” – Alan Moore, from his introduction.

Twelve tales of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy and HorrorEstablished in 2002, the NSFWG exists to enable local writers of genre fiction to learn their trade and hone their skills. The group includes both established novelists and exciting new talents. This volume features twelve original stories set in Northampton and acts as a showcase for their work.

12 stories, 256 pages, 80,000 words of intrigue, humour, magic, terror and conjecture.

Originally available as a limited edition (of just 50) dust-jacketed hardbacks and an A5 sized paperback, both of these have sold out from the publisher though Amazon have a few copies of the paperback.

However, NewCon Press has just released an ebook edition for £3.99 - available from NewCon Press here

Full contents:

1. Introduction – Alan Moore
2. A Walk of Solace with my Dead Baby – Ian Watson
3. Lifeline – Susan Sinclair
4. These Boots weren’t Made for Walking – Ian Whates
5. Mano Mart – Andy West
6. What we Sometimes do without Thinking – Mark West
7. Arthur the Witch – Donna Scott
8. Goethe’s Wig – Steve Longworth
9. The Old Man of Northampton and the Sea – Sarah Pinborough
10. The Last Economy – Paul Melhuish
11. Hanging Around – Neil K Bond
12. I Won the Earth Evacuation Lottery – Tim Taylor
13. The Tower – Nigel Edwards
14. About the Authors

Characters Must Eat, by Ian Watson

Group Chairman Ian Watson on all things culinary...

Photo credit: Enrique Corominas

Science Fiction and Fantasy cookcooks are an established tradition.

One of the inspirations of my 2-volume science fantasy saga The Books of Mana (Lucky's Harvest and The Fallen Moon) was Finnish cookbooks because now my characters would have something to feast upon.  More recently myself and my beloved Cristina (cookery author as well as Spanish translator of George Martin's A Song of Ice & Fire) co-wrote a cookbook about 50 meals named after famous people for the 50th anniversary of the leading Spanish book club Círculo de Lectores (Readers' Circle).  After a while meals began to cross-reference as though a secret history of the world was emerging gastronomically.  Here are the histories of a couple of "named" dishes, in English for the very first time.



Oysters Rockefeller
In 1840 Italian immigrant Antoine Aliciatore founded America´s oldest family-run restaurant in culturally French New Orleans after lack of success in New York.  In 1899 a shortage of imported French snails caused his son Jules to turn to the local oysters, resulting in a dish which he named after John D. Rockefeller (1839 - 1937), America´s first billionaire, because Jules´sauce was very rich too.
The sauce was also green, a purée of green vegetables famously scorning any use of spinach, though its exact ingredients were kept a family secret.  Since Antoine´s has sold 3.5 million Oysters Rockefeller between then and now, many chefs attempted copies, often courtesy of spinach.  In 1986 apparently a laboratory analysis showed the presence of parsley, puréed celery, chives, and capers as well as olive oil—one must imagine a diner suddenly running out of Antoine´s with an Oyster Rockefeller clutched in his hand and escaping in a waiting car to that laboratory.
Rockefeller grew rich by revolutionising the petroleum industry, and he was a pioneering philanthropist, endowing much medical research and two universities.  He was also a teetotaller, whereas Jules´ sauce was said to benefit by a dash of "the Green Fairy", absinthe, the preferred tipple of many French artists of the time.  So Rockefeller may never have tasted his namesake dish, or at least not in its full original glory...

Chicken Marengo
On 14 June 1800, having taken his army over the Alps into northern Italy like a latterday Hannibal, Napoleon brilliantly triumphed over the Austrians at Marengo, after which in a nearby farmhouse his cook Dunant improvised from the few items available a meal of chicken—diced by a sabre! and fried in olive oil—plus a tomato-based sauce topped with crayfish and fried eggs, a dish which became immortal, and a symbol of France.
Except for some awkward facts such as that... Dunant only began to work for Napoleon 2 years later, Napoleon didn´t eat in any farmhouse or old inn but went back to his headquarters, olive oil hardly existed locally, and Napoleon was extremely lucky to win, with huge casualties on both sides.
A master of spin, Napoleon had official maps of the battle destroyed and redrawn to conform with his vision, and was still revising the facts years later in exile.  A recent book in English, Napoleon´s Chicken Marengo: Creating the Myth of the Emperor´s Favourite Dish (2011) by Napoleonic expert Andrew Uffindell reveals fascinatingly how the name Marengo was spun for political reasons, as well as the meal itself till "Marengo" was simply a title covering a huge range of variations in the competing newfangled restaurants of Paris in the 1820s where a clever owner could make a fortune within 5 years. In 1988 the first French astronaut took tinned veal Marengo, adjusted for zero gravity, to the Mir space station, carrying this mythic meal beyond the Earth.

Member in the wild

Last week was a busy one for NSFWG member Mark West.

Ellen Datlow, leading horror anthologist, published her annual list of 'honorable mentions' (stories that don't appear in her "Best Of" but which she feels are worthy of pointing out to readers) and included West on it, with his story "The Bureau Of Lost Children".  This originally appeared in the anthology "ill at ease 2" and was workshopped at the group.

He was also part of a quartet of Writers at a reading event held at Leicester Central Library on Thursday evening.  He read from his novelette "The Mill" (which was used as his audition piece to get into the group) and took part in a lively Q&A session.

from left - James Bennett, Hardeep Sangha, West, K. T. Davies

The icing on the cake was a glowing review of his novella "Drive" (also partially workshopped in the group) from Peter Tennant in Black Static magazine.  Tennant writes; "[Drive] is a crowd pleaser, a horror story set in the urban landscape and tapping into our fears of what could so easily go wrong in this setting, a finely tuned tale that delivers all the thrills it says on the tin. I loved it, and I also think it would make a splendid little film."

More details can be found at his blog.

The House Next Door, a review by Mark West

NSFWG member Mark West reviews Anne Rivers Siddons, first published in 1978

It was an architectural masterpiece - every young couple’s dream house.  Suddenly, within it and everywhere around it, families began to suffer, to go mad…to die.

And then, with mounting terror, the family next door was struck with the paralysing fear that they were next…that the pure horror of the house could not let them live…

that their salvation lay in fire and murder…and that to survive, they must enter and destroy - 

The House Next Door

(from the back cover of my 1982 Ballantine Books edition)

Their love would never be the same.

Colquitt and Walter Kennedy enjoyed a life of lazy weekends, gathering with the neighbours on their quiet, manicured street and sipping drinks on their patios. But when construction of a beautiful new home begins in the empty lot next door, their easy friendship and relaxed get-togethers are marred by strange accidents and inexplicable happenings.

Though Colquitt's rational mind balks at the idea of a "haunted" house, she cannot ignore the tragedies associated with it. It is as if the house preys on its inhabitants' weaknesses and slowly destroys the goodness in them -- ultimately driving them to disgrace, madness and even death.

Anne Rivers Siddons transports you deep into the heart of a neighborhood torn apart by a mysterious force that threatens their friendship, their happiness and, for some, their very existence.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time - ever since, in fact, I read Stephen King’s analysis of it in “Danse Macabre” - and although it took me a long time to get hold of a copy (I finally found mine, the 1982 Ballantine edition from Canada, in a charity shop), it’s definitely been worth the wait.  Written as a contemporary novel and published in 1978, this still works perfectly with only a few hints betraying the fact that (as I write this review) it’s 36 years old.  

Col narrates the novel (apart from a brief epilogue) and she and her husband Walter are normal people, as the prologue spells out.  Thirtysomething and deeply in love, they’re not rich but not poor, they have good friends, they have a nice house in a nice area (plus a summer cottage on ‘the island’) and life in Atlanta treats them well, with Walter a partner in an ad agency and Col a freelance PR person.  When Col hears that the McIntyre lot next door to them is due to be developed, she hates the idea since it means that a lot of trees and wild life will have to go, along with their privacy.  Then she meets Kim Dougherty, the architect, who is very proud of his creation and once the house is up, Col falls for its beauty.

"[The house] commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you.  It grew out of the pencilled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless depths of time, waiting to be released…The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots.  It looked - inevitable."

The first occupants - part one of the book - are Buddy and Pie Harralson, expecting their first child and from moneyed Southern families.  Buddy is a lawyer, Pie is a perky kid who has a complex about her “daddy” and it’s clear the two men don’t get on.  Very soon, small animals - birds, chipmunks, the Harralson puppy - are killed, “smeared out of life”, though after the police are called, the murders stop.  “It was as though the murderer, having made some small point to the Harralsons, had moved on.”  The Harralsons host a house-warming party and everything goes wrong - a display of homosexuality leading to a heart attack - in a way that not only destroys lives, but the trappings of it, the reputations and standing.  It also takes its toll on Dougherty - he’s very proud of his creation but it blocks his creative drive and at the party, he realises “there’s something wrong with this house.”

Part two picks up the story as Buck & Anita Sheehan move in.  She’s been ill and he seems over-protective, though as the days and weeks pass, it comes to light that they lost their only son in Vietnam (in a tragedy similar to the one in which Anita lost her father and brother).  Anita receives phone calls with no caller and she sees her sons death in a TV movie that no station was carrying.  As she retreats into depression another neighbour, the well-respected Virginia Guthrie, helps out but can’t prevent the ultimate betrayal.  Although I won’t say what that is, Col witnesses the incident and she’s unable to tell anyone else, which ties her into the dark secrets of the house.  The house affects Kim further, leading him to try it on with an uncomplaining Col and their almost-tryst is witnessed by Walter, who is driven into a rage that they only just manage to avoid.  From this point on, as our heroes become keenly aware that something is askew, the tension begins to crank up.

Part three has the Greene’s move in.  On the surface, Norman is an overbearing, ex-army college lecturer and his wife Susan is quiet, tolerant and moneyed.  Their daughter, Melissa, is 8 and during a party she has an accident that - again - causes distress but also highlights that Norman is a monster.  At this point, the house comes between Col and her close friend Claire Swanson, another neighbour who has always been supportive and this section is beautifully written and full of pain.  When the end comes for the Greene’s, that resolution - a tragedy of the mundane - is heartbreaking as it plays out.  At this point, Col and Walter decide enough is enough and finally make a stand but the reaction is one they expect - ridicule, ostracisation and pity - and we see this once lively couple driven to extremes that couldn’t have been contemplated at the start of the book.  As everything collapses around her and Col mourns her previous life, with friends and laughter and good futures to look forward to, there’s a real sense of loss.

Then we get the final, shocking twist of the knife.

This is a wonderful book, that had me enthralled from the start to the gut-punch finish.  Wonderful written (and simply told), the whole thing is perfectly constructed and the language is often beautiful (when the Swansons move out, Col observes - “About a waiting house [there is] a sort of mournful abandonment, a wistful air of ‘Why are you leaving me?  What went wrong?'").  For the most part, Col has a lovely narrative voice and the home she shares with Walter, their sanctuary, is the exact opposite of Dougherty’s modern marvel and Siddons uses it to create a warm, homely base.

The Atlanta location is well used, from the seasons (Siddons writes the heat of summer and the coolness of the evenings so you feel as if you’re sitting on the Kennedy patio) to the mixture of old and new money (and old and new values) and the dialogue has a lilt that is pleasant to read.  The characters are well-drawn and believable within the situation (even if, as with Col sometimes, they are occasionally too stuck-up about things to be sympathetic) and the book has a nice pace to it, taking its time to set things up but with a mounting sense of tension behind it all.  The three stories (each new neighbour has its own part) give it a feel of interlinked novellas, but that works too, with Col acting as the bridge between them.

However, the novels masterstroke is the house itself.  Whilst a lot of bad things happen in it, most of them - as characters point out - could be ascribed to terrible bad luck and it’s only as a sum of the whole that gives Col’s fear of it being haunted any credence.  But is it, or is it just the fact that we have an unreliable narrator who is slowly unravelling over 278 pages?  Personally - especially regarding the ending - I think it’s the house because it doesn’t only wreak havoc on its occupants but destroys the people around it, fragmenting the neighbourhood, wrecking long-standing friendships and creating terrible secrets that help to grind down daily life.  As the blurb says, “It is as if the house preys on its inhabitants' weaknesses and slowly destroys the goodness in them -- ultimately driving them to disgrace, madness and even death” and that’s perfect.  

“The House Next Door” is a great read and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This review originally appeared on Mark's blog here