There are many unsettling scenes full of bad decisions, cruelty, and fear. Did you ever feel stressed out writing them?
In supernatural horror, these scenes are easier because there’s a monster driving the bad behavior. The characters who commit violent acts are not 100% responsible. Even when it’s bad guys doing bad things, we can excuse them because the world has gone mad and is filled with monsters. They’ve lost their marbles, and this is all cartoonish allegory, anyway.
In this book, there was no monster. There were just people. I had sympathy for all of them. I knew how I wanted this book to end, and getting there was very hard. This will read as strange, but I have a very tough time believing in bad people. So I had to figure out the exact, very rare circumstances where the story you’re holding could happen in a realistic way. In other words, I believe that 25 percent of the time, Gertie and Rhea would have stayed friends, learned from each other, and become better people and parents. Another 25 percent of the time they’d have drifted apart. About 24 percent of the time they’d have had an icy separation. And 1 percent of the time, some variant on the plot of Good Neighbors happens.
But the thing is, that rare 1 percent has enlarged in the age of social media.
We’re all expected to voice opinions on issues we often know nothing about, and then we’re expected to fight over those opinions. For reasons I cannot fathom, it’s now socially acceptable to condemn each other online—to condemn strangers and friends and politicians and celebrities. To wish them dead and call them stupid. To go after their families and their jobs and their appearances, all in the name of moral righteousness.
Regarding queasiness in my portrayals of Very Bad Things, the one character I should mention here is Shelly. Abuse is gross, and I didn’t like writing about it. Along those lines, I was also concerned about depicting a false accusation of a rape, as I did not want anyone coming away from this and saying: Look! Guys like Harvey Weinstein got a bad rap! They did not get a bad rap. They ruined a whole lot of lives because something sick inside them was allowed to grow. As I hope we’re all aware, false accusations are rare. True accusations of rape are horribly common.
What came first: The idea for the slightly supernatural sinkhole or the idea for the toxic neighbor relationships? Or were they part and parcel of the same concept?
I started with an asteroid, actually! But a novelist friend suggested it should be a sinkhole. In the early versions of this story, something supernatural comes out from the hole and starts infecting the neighbors, activating their baser natures. In that version of the book, I was skewering the way we perceive identity as defined by appearance, gender, and economics. But I could never get traction on how things ought to turn out in the end, mostly because I couldn’t figure out anything new to say. It was kind of boring, having monsters attack people—the emotional stakes didn’t mean as much to me.
I had known for some time that I should eliminate everything supernatural. There was a different story that wanted to be told, and it was calling to me. I had this picture of a family under too much pressure, and specifically, I saw Julia on a precipice, in danger. And Shelly, lost, falling backward. So, I cut about half my characters, and I made a human monster out of Rhea Schroeder. I made the plot about this single relationship gone wrong, and the sinkhole switched from being a pretext for horror to a kind of Geiger counter for the bonkers psychological state of Maple Street.
I keep using the word I, but I was not alone. My agent, Stacia Decker, read very many drafts and suggested very many excellent edits. She changed everything for me and for the work. My acquiring editor, Loan Le, also had a big hand in shaping this book. She asked all the questions I didn’t want to answer. Because I didn’t know the answers! So I had to go back and figure all that out.
All of your main characters have complex, rich backstories that slowly come to the surface over the course of the novel. Did one character’s backstory intrigue you the most? Was there any character who you found challenging to develop?
Rhea was great fun and also great work to write. Once I decided that my story had to be human and not supernatural, I had to figure out under what circumstances regular people might be driven to violence. The false accusation of child molestation seemed pretty clearly like something that would stir up the neighbors, and maybe spur a few of them to throw a brick through a window. But even under those circumstances, riled-up neighbors would still need a ringleader to instigate more serious violence, and I couldn’t figure out what kind of person that would be. Why would anyone follow someone like Rhea, and why would she want to do something so awful?