The London Times Literary Supplement has called Thomas Berger "one of the century's most important writers."Zoland Books is proud to reissue Neighbors, a timeless parable of suburban paranoia, and his most acclaimed novel after Little Big Man. In Neighbors, suburban regular-guy Earl Keese confronts the yawning pit of chaos in the persons of Harry and Ramona, a younger couple who have just moved into the only other house on their dead-end street. Literally overnight Earl's carefully controlled world is turned upside down. Ramona is alternately seductive and treacherous, Harry by turns cajoling and threatening, and their behavior, to Earl's way of thinking, increasingly dangerous and bizarre. Trouble is, no one, from his boozy wife, Enid, to his beloved daughter Elaine, to the circle of supposed friends to whom he appeals for help, will see things Earl's way.
"A tale of domestic guerrilla warfareA wonderfully funny and mysterious book."-The New York Times Book Review
"Neighbors is a flawlessly crafted morality play, constructed out of the most subtle minutiae of perception and expression - as if Henry James had written Waiting for Godot."-The Nation
"Highly readable, often very funny, and thought-provoking; it is existential slapstickBerger takes an honorable place in the lineage not only of Kafka but of Joyce and Nabokov."-The Washington Post
"Neighbors offers a version of reality skewed just enough to give paranoia a good name."-Time
Thomas Berger's most recent novel is The Return of Little Big Man (Little, Brown 1999). He is the author of more than twenty novels, a number of which have been made into movies, including Little Big Man and Neighbors. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.Chapter One
"It would have been nice," said Earl Keese to himself as much as to the wife who sat across the coffee table from him, "to have invited them over for a drink."
"We can certainly do that tomorrow," said Enid. "Nothing is really lost."
"But of course tomorrow won't be the day they moved in, will it?" Keese reflectively sipped his transparent wine. "I find
