5/25/26
If you read one thing today, you’ll want to make it this profile of an author who was embedded at OpenAi for a year, and is now hitting the panic button: “Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But… their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. …the ideological pursuit of the machine god. We’ve seen this collapsing of the entire AI field and the entire industry towards a singular approach that is intellectually extremely lazy and societally deeply harmful.”
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Women In Horror Year: Day 42
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
Step into the spellbinding world of The House Next Door, a Southern Gothic masterpiece blending suburban suspense, eerie hauntings, and the collision of Old and New South ideals, as a peaceful Atlanta neighborhood succumbs to the darkness of an unholy house.
Thirtysomething Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a charming, peaceful suburb of newly bustling Atlanta, Georgia. Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they'd believed would always remain undeveloped. Disappointed by their diminished privacy, Colquitt and Walter soon realize something more is wrong with the house next door. Surely the house can’t be haunted, yet it seems to destroy the goodness of every person who comes to live in it, until the entire heart of this friendly neighborhood threatens to be torn apart.
It doesn’t get more seminal than this one, folks. First published by Simon & Schuster in 1978, The House Next Door went on to become both a New York Times bestseller and then a cultural phenomenon. This book was everywhere for a while. My mother and the other ladies in the Bethlehem United Methodist Church book club, who would have never read a Horror novel (although the genre had been around for centuries, it was only then beginning to be marketed as its own category) but they read the hell out of this one (and then my mom began working her way through young Brian’s Stephen King books, as well). Heralded repeatedly as euqally important to haunted house stories as the work of Shirley jackson, and deservedly so, The House Next Door is a foundational cornerstone for horror fiction, and a book every fan should read at least once in their life. But here’s the thing — don’t take my word for it, because at the end of the day, I’m not the best qualified person to write about the history of our genre. The ones who were the best qualified — Karl Edward Wagner, John Pelan, and J.F. Gonzalez — are no longer with us. But I’ve also been championing Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson as the heirs to that position. I’ve enjoyed their books and podcast. They often focus on some historical corners of the genre that have long been overlooked. They do it in a fuin, accessible way. And Lisa’s write up on this book, which can be found here, is a perfect example of that, and will convince you to read it far more eloquently than I ever could.
So, go read Lisa’s essay. Then read The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, which is available in paperback and eBook, as well as older copies in abundance on the secondary market.
