Neighbor George
Turn of the Screw meets The Birds—
Do you know the language of the birds?
Summer, 1979: An isolated young woman housesitting in an eccentric bohemian beach enclave finds troubling reminders of past family tragedy surfacing in odd and unsettling ways. When a mysterious stranger moves in next door, she hopes for a romance like the ones in the novels she secretly devours. But a dark truth hidden since childhood erupts shockingly in a violent otherworldly intrusion, catapulting Dovey into a desperate struggle for her life and sanity.
Set in a haunted northern California landscape populated by poets, New Agers, stoners, and burnouts, Neighbor George is a seriously subverted Gothic that mixes wry social satire with a deeply atmospheric story of psychological horror—all unfolding in the liminal space where the natural collides with the supernatural.
“If Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock had collaborated to write a novel that would scare you senseless, they might have come up with Victoria Nelson’s Neighbor George. Lulled for the first few pages by Nelson’s brilliant description of Bolinas, a laid-back, eccentric small town in West Marin, California, you may soon find yourself double locking your doors and searching frantically for a nightlight as Nelson piles on twist after unexpected twist, horror after unexpected horror in this deadly dance of predator and prey. Got a sexy new neighbor moving in next door? You might not want to take him a casserole.
—Mary Mackey, New York Times best-selling author of A Grand Passion
A compelling and wittily written tale where omens lie low in the elegant prose before it gathers monstrous menace and then raises us towards mystery and awe.”
—Ramsey Campbell
“In this vivid page-turning gothic novel centered around the wry portrait of a decaying California left-coast hamlet on the fog-bound Pacific, a thirst-for-life quest turns ominously into a journey into self-abolishment and murder as Victoria Nelson exposes old lust meeting young need and New Age wacky mantras colliding with hungry ghosts seeking souls in a bohemian utopia haunted by restless spirits and death drives. Light-drenched and wit filled, brilliantly composed, Neighbor George will join canonical California novels like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, Denis Johnson’s Almost Dead, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and Louis B. Jones’s California’s Over.”
—Rob Sean Wilson, author of Waking in Seoul, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted, and Beat Attitudes