Abstract
Halfway through Anne Rivers Siddons’ 1978 novel The House Next Door suburbanite Colquitt Kennedy tries to convince her best friend Claire that the titular residence is haunted. Claire is notably unconvinced:
Don’t you see that I can believe anything but that? Anything — bad luck, flaky neighbours, magnetic fields, noxious vapours, what ever god awful accident of natural laws and physical phenomena that might explain some of that stuff over there — yes, I can swallow any of that crap if I have to. But not that there is a malign intelligence working in a house that’s less than a year old, on this street, in this neighbourhood. Colquitt, if I believed that I could not function in this world anymore.1
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© 2009 Bernice M. Murphy
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Murphy, B.M. (2009). Introduction: Welcome to Disturbia. In: The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244757_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244757_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30418-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-24475-7
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