Neighbor George
Victoria Nelson
312pp / 124mm x 191mm
Limited edition signed hardback of 200 copies
Paperback / Hardback
£14.99 / £25.00
Hear Victoria Nelson and Roger Luckhurst in conversation about Neighbor George here!
————————
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
If ever there were a beach read of the weird, it’s NEIGHBOR GEORGE
- Weird Studies
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.
- Mary Mackey, author of A Grand Passion
[Neighbor George] plays with and subverts the calculus of desire… deconstructing it psychologically and as a genre, as Gothic Romance gives way to Gothic Horror… The novel draws its marvelous sense of atmosphere from the years Nelson lived in the West Marin town of Bolinas in the late 1970s, and her feel for the dark side of its poetry Bohemia is clearly hard earned… The story goes through some marvelous twists and turns—including one literal twist and turn that punctures the everyday veneer of the story with unsettling anomaly, and that now seems to have taken up a permanent home in my memory palace of Weird lit.
- Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness
Summer, 1979: A lonely young woman housesitting in an isolated bohemian enclave finds troubling reminders of a past family tragedy surfacing in odd and unsettling ways. When a mysterious man moves in next door, Dovey 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 her 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 deeply atmospheric story of psychological horror enacted in the space where the natural and supernatural collide, a mythic territory of possession shared by its comic companion tale, Bolinas Venus, also included in this volume.
————————
About the editor
Victoria Nelson is the author of two acclaimed cultural histories of the supernatural, The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka, two collections of short stories, and a memoir. She edited the Robert Aickman collection Compulsory Games for New York Review Books.