A Chicago cul-de-sac is about to get a new neighbor…of the demonic kind. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Maureen Kilmer’s Suburban Hell, which is out now!
Amy Foster considers herself lucky. After she left the city and moved to the suburbs, she found her place quickly with neighbors Liz, Jess, and Melissa, snarking together from the outskirts of the PTA crowd. One night during their monthly wine get-together, the crew concoct a plan for a clubhouse She Shed in Liz’s backyard–a space for just them, no spouses or kids allowed.
But the night after they christen the She Shed, things start to feel . . . off. They didn’t expect Liz’s little home-improvement project to release a demonic force that turns their quiet enclave into something out of a nightmare. And that’s before the homeowners’ association gets wind of it.
Even the calmest moms can’t justify the strange burn marks, self-moving dolls, and horrible smells surrounding their possessed friend, Liz. Together, Amy, Jess, and Melissa must fight the evil spirit to save Liz and the neighborhood . . . before the suburbs go completely to hell.
Rocky and I started down the darkened street, the only lights the few gas lamps left over from the sixties. We had one in our yard when we moved in but noticed a faint gas smell in the air periodically from the driveway. We had the gas company come out, and they told us it was leaking and had to be shut off. After that we had a nonfunctional gas light at the end of our driveway, but when I heard the cost to remove it, I decided it could stay even though it felt a little like having a broken-down car on cinder blocks sitting there. At least the HOA hadn’t yelled at us about that…yet.
A few blocks over, I could hear a group of neighbors on someone’s front porch, having drinks. Whispering Farms was the kind of subdivision where you’d find porch beers in the summer and hot toddies around a firepit in the winter. It was socially engineered to keep people in the bubble, for it had everything you could want.
Rocky and I walked in the direction of Jess’s house first, preparing to round the block toward Liz’s. I had grabbed a bottle of Pedialyte from my fridge before I left and planned to leave it on her doorstep to help with her hangover or flu or whatever it was. The smell from her backyard lingered in the air, like clothes that had been left in the washer for too long. A rotting, old, cloying smell that made it hard to inhale.
“Looks like we picked the wrong night to walk down Maple Leaf Drive,” I said to Rocky, who wagged his tail. We moved past Jess’s house; she was strolling around her first floor without a bra on. Again. She grew up on what was essentially a hippie commune made up of former groupies of the band Wavy Gravy in the north woods of Wisconsin. Some habits were apparently hard to break.
As we got closer to Liz’s house, I saw that Tim had set their W flag on the front porch. He put it outside whenever the Chicago Cubs won a baseball game, but it was more to remind the neighbors that he had season tickets than team pride.
The smell intensified, and Rocky started whining and pulling at the leash, wanting to go home. Finally, he stopped on the sidewalk and sat, refusing to move, his eyes shifting back toward our house.
“Really? It’s not that bad. Let me just drop this off for Liz.” But even as I said the words, the smell filled my nose, swirling into my mouth, and I gagged, bending down toward the sidewalk. “Nevermind.” I started to turn around to head the other way, back toward my house, when a flash of light from Liz’s made me turn back.
It was a quick blaze of light coming from her bedroom window, and it happened so fast, I thought it might be lightning. I looked up at the sky and saw a spray of stars above me. Not lightning. I watched the house, waiting to see if another flash would come, and saw a dark figure move across the bedroom window. It was too big to be Liz or Tim, and was angular, like it had sharp edges. From her house, I heard Bucky begin to bark, before he stopped with a yelp.
“What’s going on in there?” I lifted my foot to take a step toward the house, to make sure everything was okay, but Rocky whined and pulled in the other direction again, an immobile statue. I thought about tying him to the street sign on the corner to go over and check on Liz, but he started shaking in fear. So I pulled out my phone and texted her instead.
I waited for a moment, the night air seeming to pause, and my pulse quickened as I stared at her house, hoping for a sign of my friend.
Rocky started frantically pulling at his leash, snarling in the effort. I bent down to soothe him, and he maneuvered away, desperately trying to go home.
“OK, you win,” I said. I gave one final glance toward Liz’s house, which was dark again. Darker than I had ever seen it. “The exterior lights must be out,” I muttered as I let Rocky steer me.
Liz didn’t respond until Rocky and I were inside the front door and I was unclipping his leash.
I didn’t see anything, was the text back.
I shook my head as I put my phone in my back pocket. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe a car had pulled into a driveway down the street. A thousand things were possible. I didn’t want to press the issue and become one of the paranoid moms I saw on the Winchester Facebook Moms group, regularly posting about neighbors who didn’t clean up after their dogs, teenagers speeding down the street, or people who had cut them off in traffic. It was the worst kind of policing, and one that didn’t do any good, just started fights on social media.
Years ago, I would have never imagined that I would live in a town that became embroiled in such petty drama so often. Mark and I had vowed we weren’t going to become those suburbanites who talked about mowing their lawn and tree trimming services. No, we were much better than that—we were city people. Who took our kids to fancy restaurants and walked everywhere. Who shared one car that we barely drove, and always knew where to get the best Indian takeout.
I was deeply aware of how uncool and boring the suburbs were. And yet I would soon come to find that our suburb was anything but mundane.
Excerpted From SUBURBAN HELL by Maureen Kilmer, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Bear One Holdings, LLC.
