Neighbors Review

Tension

Neighbors opens with the main character Heather preparing to leave for college. Her relationship with her adoptive parents is strained, and there is an almost Harry Potter-esque vibe as she prepares to leave. She tolerates them in a resigned way, without resentment or even a great deal of tension because they are barely more than caricatures, but there is a sense of relief at being able to escape them.

Heather had a crush on a boy as a child—a boy in a strange, cult-like community. It is his picture on a college brochure that has helped her choose this college in particular. When she finally reconnects with this boy, she finds that community is as present as ever.

The tension climbs throughout the story, inspired by intrigue, manipulation, and the hint that something deadly is about to occur. The conspiracy surrounding the boy Chase is engaging, especially since he is kept artificially unaware of it. The plot thickens as the reader begins to identify a similar shadowy network around Heather.

One group wants to keep them apart. The other seems to be trying to encourage their relationship for unknown reasons.

Chase in the Present

I really appreciated the choice Menkhaus made to put Chase’s point of view in the present tense. I’m not generally a fan of present tense storytelling, let alone tense changes within a story, but I felt that it worked to great effect here.

Something the Neighbors are doing is keeping Chase in a sort of limbo, where every day is the same and he doesn’t have a lot of continuity between them. He is missing some pretty big pieces from his memory, including his little sister who died.

The present tense creates a contrast between him and the other POV characters, especially Heather. It makes him feel cut off from his past and without the assured future assumed by narrative hindsight. And it was polished: there was never a grammar slip-up between the tenses.

Proactive Characters

In addition to Heather and Chase, Chase’s friends (and Neighbors) occasionally appear as point of view characters. The omniscient perspective allows the reader to see that these students are similarly trapped by the conspiracy, although they have slightly more information than Chase does.

Even though they form the primary barrier between the couple, their predicament is sympathetic; they are not blindly following orders nor behaving irrationally, but consider their options carefully and make an effort to take their fate in their own hands.

I was less interested in the Agents who took a larger role in the latter half of the story. I was not as invested in them, having had limited knowledge of them earlier. They manifest popular storybook characters, and their magical abilities serve to deliver the deus ex machina regarding Chase’s inherent, monstrous problem.

Romance

Neighbors is primarily a romance. The tone is suspenseful, and the tension is based on interpersonal intrigue and misunderstandings that grow out of the sci-fi premise.

SPOILERS

The situation is that two rival secret companies are using nanotech to pull beasts from the fourth dimension and give them human bodies. The risk is that if the mind-matrix falls apart, they could revert to beasts and kill everyone around them.

This would be a crazy place to start a sci-fi story, but in Neighbors, the picture isn’t clear until the third act. This is the explanation, rather than the set-up. The story is about the relationship between Heather and Chase and the mystery behind their interactions.

I found the romance pleasant and not super intense. There isn’t a lot of emotionally-charged desire fantasy, and the tension rests within the conspiracy between the rival companies that each have a vested interest in controlling the couple’s relationship.

A Word on the “Cult”

I’m not a fan of the tendency to cast villains as religious believers, and unfortunately Neighbors falls into that tired pattern. The most focused antagonist in Neighbors is a reverend. He refers frequently to God and God’s will, usually equating it with his own, of course. Religion here is simply another way to emphasize the values (“loyalty and consistency”) that allow the Neighbors to control Chase.

The term “cult” is used repeatedly regarding the Neighbors. The word does emphasize that this is not really the normal role of religion or universal behavior for Christianity. Disdainful treatment of faith is levied occasionally at the Reverend, who frequently brings God into conversations as justification for his own actions. Without a balance of earnest faith elsewhere in the story, the cliché generalization and criticisms are all that remains.

Check Out Neighbors!

Neighbors is a fun romantic sci-fi story with compelling suspense and interesting characters. I look forward to reading some of the novellas that continue the story in the Public Domain Agents series.