Lon

I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.

Nintendo’s ‘Super Mario 3D World’ Gets Another Chance On The Switch

Arts, ,

by Kaity Kline

Nintendo’s ill-fated Wii U just wasn’t a popular console — which means there are fantastic Wii U games that most people have never played. Luckily, some of those games are getting a second chance at life on the Nintendo Switch — which a lot more people own, thanks to the pandemic-driven Animal Crossing craze.

Super Mario 3D World is one of those games that didn’t get the attention it deserved when it was released in 2013. But it’s now out for the Nintendo Switch as Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, and it’s two games in one; Bowser’s Fury is a brand new, short, open world adventure for players who want something more challenging.

I had never played ‘Super Mario 3D World’ before last Friday, and now it’s one of my favorite Mario games — worth it even without ‘Bowser’s Fury’ tacked on.

I had never played Super Mario 3D World before last Friday, and now it’s one of my favorite Mario games — worth it even without Bowser’s Fury tacked on. It sucked me in so completely that I couldn’t tear myself away. Hours went by in minutes, and suddenly it was 3am and I was falling asleep with my Switch on top of me.

SM3DW has the same concept as past Super Mario games. You are dropped at the beginning of a linear world map and unlock new levels as you beat each challenge, eventually making it to World 8 to defeat Bowser and free the Sprixies, fairy-like creatures he rudely kidnapped and put into jars.

While level progression is linear, you can still wander around the world map to find secret levels and minigames that help Mario on his mission. The levels with Captain Toad that appear in every world are the most fun — you venture through an obstacle course filled with collectable stars, but without the ability to jump, so you need to strategize.

When you’re in the levels, you’re roaming freely in beautifully designed environments with up to four players as Mario, Princess Peach, Toad, or Luigi — Rosalina is unlockable later in the game. With the Switch version, you’re now able to do online multiplayer and get some help (or some sabotage) from your friends, though I played it alone and still had an amazing time.

Super Mario 3D World is an easy game. I finished it in about a day. If you get stuck, you have the option to skip feeling frustrated altogether, because you get handed a really overpowered powerup that deflects and destroys any monster or projectile in your path.

So If you want a challenge, the new game Bowser’s Fury will give you that. I was shocked at how difficult it was, especially in the endgame.

In Bowser’s Fury, Bowser is well … furious. You spend the game accompanied by his son Bowser Jr. in yet another beautiful open world, this one made up of different islands filled with challenges — and cats. I mean it. Everything in the game is a cat: the bushes, trees, monsters. It’s adorable. Instead of stars, you collect Cat Shines that light up lighthouses around the map.

What’s not adorable is the way Bowser terrorizes you for the entire game. Unlike other Mario games where Bowser is a threat located only in a castle you choose to go into, here he’s a threat that randomly appears at any time during your adventure. You’re able to roam the islands and complete challenges peacefully for only a few minutes at a time, then a gigantic Bowser will chase you and try to kill you with fireballs and flame breath. And unless Mario has enough Cat Shines to unlock a boss fight with Bowser, you need to hide behind structures to block a few of his targeted attacks and wait for him to go away again.

One big problem with the game is the camera angles in those boss fights. It sometimes felt like getting the camera in the right position to see Bowser’s attacks was a bigger battle than the actual fighting.

Unlike Super Mario 3D World, Bowser’s Fury is only for 1-2 players. One person plays as Mario and the other person supports them as Bowser Jr. It’s only available for local multiplayer, but I wouldn’t recommend playing that way unless the second person is fine with only doing really simple, boring tasks to support Mario — it’s a lot like the multiplayer in Mario Odyssey (which I also didn’t like, for the same reason).

This game will really have you on edge at the beginning. It was intimidating for me at first, because I crack under pressure! Then you relax and it becomes easier as you learn how to deal with Bowser. After that, he’s more of a constant nuisance than a threat because he pops up way too frequently.

But at the end of the game avoiding Bowser stops being easy, and it came with no warning. He gets extra mad that you’re close to beating him and turns into an omnipresent stalker, relentlessly attacking you as you’re scrambling to get the last few Cat Shines required to unlock the final fight.

There are a total of 100 Cat Shines in the game, so 100 different challenges, and it takes 50 to unlock the final battle. And despite a few hitches, I think Bowser’s Fury is a great game, packed with fun puzzles and islands to explore.

If you already have a Switch, Super Mario 3D World: Bowser’s Fury should definitely be added to your collection. You can’t go wrong with two great games in one.

Kaity Kline is a columnist for NPR’s Join the Game and a producer on 1A. She is a native of New Jersey, a lifelong gamer, and a former gaming YouTuber. She tweets at @kaitykline

The Creation Of The Magnificent Makers

Food For Thought,

by Madeline K. Sofia and Rebecca Ramirez

Theanne Griffith has always loved science and literature. But her career has always focused on the science— specifically, neuroscience. She’s now a researcher at the University of California, Davis.

Theanne Griffith is a neuroscientist and author of the children’s book series, The Magnificent Makers.

But during her maternity leave, she felt a renewed urgency to embrace that other passion for books and writing. 

So, she took the natural next steps: change the good ol’ Twitter handle, create a website—plus, of course, write and pitch publishers like mad. 

Until finally, The Magnificent Makers children’s book series was born. 

The books follow two third graders, Violet and Pablo, through science-based adventures. In each book, they are zapped through a magical scientific instrument into an alternate universe, where they complete challenges that test their scientific knowledge. Readers are able to complete exercises along with the pair and at-home experiments are included at the end.

Brain Trouble, the second book in The Magnificent Makers series.

The three books in the series include: How to Test a Friendship, Brain Trouble, and Riding Sound Waves. 

Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at [email protected].

‘I’m Not A Cover Girl’: Halima Aden On Why She Decided To Leave A Modeling Career

Arts, ,

by Ziad Buchh

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 27: Halima Aden attends the premiere of Netflix’s “Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly” at Barker Hangar on August 27, 2019 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

For Halima Aden, the decision to walk away from a career as the world’s first hijab-wearing supermodel was fairly clear-cut. She’s felt used for so long, she says — by the modeling industry and by UNICEF, the organization that photographed her as a child in a refugee camp in Kenya and which she later served as an ambassador for.

Aden has been featured on the covers of Vogue, Elle and Allure magazines. And she walked the runway for Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty and Kanye West’s Yeezy. 

She tells Morning Edition host Rachel Martin she wanted to be a role model for young girls while being true to herself, but she wasn’t accomplishing either. Modeling, she realized, was in “direct conflict” with who she is.

“I’m not a cover girl, I’m Halima from Kakuma,” she says. “I want to be the reason why girls have confidence within themselves, not the reason for their insecurity.”

Aden was raised in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya. She and her family moved to Minnesota in 2004 when she was 7.

It was there that her journey as a model began when she competed for Miss Minnesota USA in 2016 seeking a scholarship. She finished in the semifinals and says from there, modeling “fell from the sky” into her lap.

Interview Highlights

You saw [modeling] not just as a chance to wear gorgeous clothes and to have your photo in magazines but also as a way to help people.

Growing up in America — not seeing representation, not seeing anybody who dressed like me, look like me — it did make me feel like, wow, what’s wrong with me, you know? And I’m sure if I had, if I would have had representation growing up, I would have been so much more confident to wear my hijab, to be myself, to be authentic. But to be that person, to grow up and be on the cover of magazines, I’ve covered everything from Vogue to Allure, some of the biggest publications in fashion. And yet I still couldn’t relate personally to my own image because that’s not who I really am. That’s not how I really dress. That’s not how my hijab really looks. And, you know, fashion, it can be a very creative field, and I completely appreciate that. But my hijab was just getting spread so thin that I knew I had to give it all away, give it up. I’m not a cover girl. I am Halima from Kakuma. I want to be the reason why girls have confidence within themselves, not the reason for their insecurity.

When you say your hijab was being kind of styled out of existence, what passed for a hijab as you were walking down those runways?

Everything. Oh, my goodness. I had jeans at one point on my head as a hijab. I had Gucci pants styled as a turban. It just didn’t even make sense, and I felt so far removed from the image itself.

During the pandemic you decided to walk away from fashion and UNICEF. Was it a complicated decision? 

I’ll be honest with you, the feelings that I’ve had towards the fashion industry and UNICEF, it was just multiplying as the years went on. So it was just festering. You know, because the fashion industry is very known to use these young girls and boys while they’re young — age 14 to like 24, I think, is the average career of a model. And then they just replace them and move on to a newer model. And same with UNICEF. They’ve been photographing me and using me since the time I was a baby in a refugee camp. I remember getting those headshots taken and it made me feel, it’s very dehumanizing. And so I wanted to show UNICEF, too. How does it feel to be used? It’s not a good feeling. And so let’s stop using people.

What are you going to do [next]?

For me right now, I don’t know what’s next. And that’s OK. That’s OK, because I’m young and I have time to figure it out. And I’m grateful. I’m grateful to the people that I’ve met. I’m grateful to the agents that I worked with. I’m grateful for the experiences I was able to have these last four years. But at the same time, I just am also grateful that I don’t have to do that anymore because it was in direct conflict with who I am as an individual, as a human being.

The Intimate, Quietly Moving ‘Supernova’ Lets Its Stars Shine

Film, ,

by Glen Weldon

As you watch Supernova — writer/director Harry Macqueen’s light-on-dialogue, heavy-on-emotion tale of a gay couple coming to terms with the fact that one of them is experiencing early-onset dementia — you keep getting struck by the amount of trust the film places in its two leads.

Which makes sense, considering that the two leads in question are Colin Firth, as British concert pianist Sam, and Stanley Tucci, as American novelist Tusker. The latter is the one who is losing himself, and who seems, of the two of them, much more sanguine about it. 

In an early, wordless scene, Tusker wanders away from the RV in which the two are touring the British Lake District. A worried Sam drives along a narrow country lane until he spots Tusker; as he gets out to retrieve him, Macqueen’s camera stays in the RV, looking out at the two of them through the windshield. Sam approaches Tusker, and reassures a concerned motorist that everything’s fine. (Everything is not fine). Tusker sees Sam and breaks down; they embrace.

A lesser film would place us up with them, in the middle of that embrace, amid the tears and relief and whispered assurances. But Macqueen — an actor himself, and a good one, a fact which seems not inconsequential here — knows we don’t need it. Tucci and Firth can sell that moment, in all its panicked intimacy, just through the set of their shoulders and the way their bodies slump into one another. 

Supernova is marked by that kind of knowing restraint, that delineates the difference between sentiment (true, earned emotion) and sentimentality (the cheap, manipulative attempt to tug at our heartstrings). In scene after scene, as the two men visit friends and family one last time, we glimpse the showier, more maudlin film that Supernova could but never does devolve into, hovering just at the edges. Only in its closing moments, which are predicated by a dramatic conflict of the sort that stories like this one require, does the movie become the “here’s one for the Oscar reel” actorly showcase it’s always threatened to be, but the track has been carefully laid, and its hard to begrudge these two actors the chance to dig in.

As Sam, Firth is at once soulful and circumspect, having buried his fears about his impending loss and his worries that he will not be up to the demands of caregiving, so as not to worry his partner. We’ve seen Firth do the British stiff-upper-lip thing countless times, and it’s good to see him in a role that allows that lip to quiver a bit.

Tucci’s role is more demanding, in that it so readily invites big, actorly choices to register his condition. But he cannily underplays Tusker as a man gifted with the emotional intelligence to disguise the true extent of his dementia, at least for now. When he struggles for the right word, it’s never overt — Tucci passes it off like a momentary glitch, nothing to worry about. 

That Supernova is centered on the lives of two 60-year-old gay men is notable for a couple reasons. One, sheer novelty: Stories about gay men of a certain age dealing with non-AIDS-related mortality remain relatively rare. Two, had the couple at the heart of the story been a heterosexual one, the central tension — can one partner care for another? — would have been weighed down with hoary notions about traditional gender roles. Focusing on a same-sex couple means preconceived, abstract notions about masculinity and femininity can be dispensed with, so we can focus instead on the shifting power dynamics between these two specific individuals. 

Firth and Tucci are longtime friends in real life, and they were originally slotted into the opposite role to the one they ended up playing in the film. Once you’ve seen Supernova, that fact will be hard to wrap your head around, as the actors seem so well-suited to their respective characters. They likely would have proven just as capable at capturing the intimacy that Sam and Tusker share, but it’s hard to imagine that they’d have found the small, individual grace notes they do here — wordless moments that express both an understated delight in what they have, and the devastating knowledge that it will soon be gone forever.

Meshell Ndegeocello: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Music

by Lauren Onkey

NPR Music’s Tiny Desk series will celebrate Black History Month by featuring four weeks of Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning different genres and generations each week. The lineup includes both emerging and established artists who will be performing a Tiny Desk concert for the first time. This celebration highlights the beautiful cornucopia of Black music and our special way of presenting it. We hope you enjoy.

Meshell Ndegeocello‘s Tiny Desk (home) concert feels like a narrative film. Shot in vivid black and white, the concert includes songs from throughout her career framed by her thoughts on the importance and influence of James Baldwin: “He deserves flowers every day. Most of all because he was willing to discuss things that were painful, hard to look at, hard to see, hard to accept.”

That description also applies to Ndegeocello’s inventive and challenging work on display here. She opens with “Step Into the Projects” from her 1993 debut album, Plantation Lullabies, transformed from its original funky groove into a stark spoken word piece. “Price of the Ticket,” with her longtime guitarist Chris Bruce, is from Ndegeocello’s recent project, Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin, “a 21st century ritual toolkit for justice” inspired by Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

She moves next from these songs about communal life to two that dig into internal turmoil. “Forget My Name” from Comet Come To Me (2014) is stripped down from its original reggae arrangement and lays bare the haunting imagery in the lyrics. “Fool of Me,” from her acclaimed album Bitter (1999), ends the set with just vocals and guitar. This is one of the most intimate, focused and intense Tiny Desk concerts you’ll find.

SET LIST

  • “Step Into The Projects”
  • “Price Of The Ticket”
  • “Forget My Name”
  • “Fool Of Me”

MUSICIANS

  • Meshell Ndegeocello: vocals, bass
  • Chris Bruce: guitar

CREDITS

  • Video: Chris Bruce, Meshell Ndegeocello and Morley Kamen
  • Audio: Chris Bruce and Meshell Ndegeocello

TINY DESK TEAM

  • Producer: Abby O’Neill
  • Video Producer: Morgan Noelle Smith
  • Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
  • Art Director: CJ Riculan
  • Associate Producer: Bobby Carter
  • Tiny Production Team: Bob Boilen, Kara Frame, Maia Stern
  • Executive Producer: Lauren Onkey
  • Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

Trove Of Antique Portraits, Including 1 Of Susan B. Anthony, Found In Attic

Food For Thought,

by Ryan Benk

“Oh my God, I think we found the Goonies treasure.” 

That’s what David Whitcomb thought late last year when he discovered what appeared to be a secret attic of a building he’d just bought in Geneva, N.Y. There, he found century-old photographs and equipment — and a mystery. 

Whitcomb, who had just purchased the historic building to expand his law practice, remembers that he had invited a friend over for a tour. 

“While we were on the third floor, which is vacant, standing there talking, we were looking up at the ceiling and … the drop ceiling is kind of falling apart in parts and we were kind of poking at the one spot,” Whitcomb tells Morning Edition. “We assumed what we were going to see was the roof.”

From the outside, Whitcomb said, the building didn’t seem to have an attic. No one — not the sellers nor the owners before them — had any idea one existed, Whitcomb says. But there it was — a concealed room, sealed by drywall and lost to time.

They piled up chairs so Whitcomb could stick his head through the hole in the ceiling. Shining his cell phone’s light around the space, he said, he saw stacks and piles of “gorgeous, gilded, turn-of-the-century photo frames.”

What he’d found was a hidden portrait studio from the turn of the 20th century: antique backdrops, equipment, glass negatives and prints, mostly of area locals — though not all of them were unknowns. One was a portrait of a woman in profile, holding a book. She looked familiar, like Susan B. Anthony, he says. When he Googled her, it was the image that came up. The 43-year-old attorney had come across one of the most famous photographs of the legendary suffragist taken a year before she died.

“It’s in the Library of Congress,” Whitcomb says.

Anthony is a familiar citizen of upstate New York. She lived in Rochester for many years where she organized for the rights of women. Anthony was also famously arrested in Rochester for voting in 1872. Suffragist history runs deep in the area with the first national women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., about a half hour’s drive from Whitcomb’s new law office in Geneva. 

In addition to Anthony, Whitcomb found what is believed to be a portrait of fellow suffragist, and Anthony friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Many of the items in the attic bore the name James Ellery Hale, a photographer who had a thriving business in the late to early 1900s to about 1920, Whitcomb says. He later learned his new building once housed Hale’s studio. But the attic storage above the third floor is still a mystery. He says no one is quite sure how the stash ended up there, much less why the attic entrance was plastered over.

Whitcomb isn’t sure what will happen next to the collection. He enlisted the help of a local auction company to help clean and catalogue his findings, the most precious of them being a piece from that Susan B. Anthony portrait’s glass negative. He hopes, COVID restrictions allowing, much of the collection can go on display somewhere by the summer.

“We were just blown away by the volume of stuff,” he says. “The amount of material up in that attic was insane. It was like going on an Easter egg hunt and opening every Easter egg as you go and you find gold.”

‘Superstore’ Is A Big Box Of Joy, Laughter And Inevitable Romance

Television,

by Stephen Thompson and Ronald Young Jr.

SUPERSTORE — “Essential” Episode 601 — Pictured: (l-r) Mark McKinney as Glenn, Lauren Ash as Dina, America Ferrera as Amy — (Photo by: Greg Gayne/NBC)

For six seasons, the NBC comedy Superstore has told the story of a fictional big-box store in St. Louis. Until the last handful of episodes, the show starred America Ferrera, and found humor in serious topics like income inequality, health insurance, unionization, and corporate greed. Its final season is airing now, with storylines about COVID-19 and racial justice. Superstore is also a big, broad, goodhearted workplace comedy in the spirit of The Office, full of wacky oddballs — played by Ben Feldman, Mark McKinney, Lauren Ash, Nico Santos, Nicole Sakura and Colton Dunn, and more — and slow-burning romantic intrigue.

The audio was produced by Mike Katzif and edited by Jessica Reedy.

Director Shaka King’s Journey From ‘Newlyweeds’ To ‘The Black Messiah’

Film, , ,

by Andrew Limbong

As the current chairman of the Black Panther Party Cubs, Fred Hampton, Jr. was guarded when he heard a studio wanted to make a movie about his late father, Fred Hampton. With good reason, too. The elder Hampton was the fiery and charismatic chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. The FBI had its eye on him through a program called COINTELPRO, where they would infiltrate groups like the Black Panthers and use information to launch disinformation smear campaigns.

Hampton was in the midst of corralling disparate, multi-racial groups under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition. The idea was to organize these groups to fight poverty and police brutality. Then, Chicago police shot and killed Hampton and another member of the Black Panther Party in an early morning raid. In an interview, Hampton, Jr. pointed out others have tried to make this movie without coming correct — no knowledge or respect for the legacy of Hampton and the Illinois Black Panther party. “Legacy,” he said, “is more important than our life.”

This is what director Shaka King was thinking about when he signed on to make Judas and the Black Messiah, the new movie about the life of Fred Hampton through the eyes of William O’Neal — the man who infiltrated the Black Panthers on behalf of the FBI. The pitch he got from the movie’s co-writers, Kenny and Keith Lucas, was a movie about Hampton and O’Neal that was like Martin Scorsese’s gangster film, The Departed, but set inside the world of COINTELPRO. It didn’t take much beyond that. “I was like, I see it. I’m done. I’m in,” said King. 

The result is a tense, thrilling movie that draws as much from The Talented Mr. Ripleyas it does The Departed, packaging Hampton’s radical politics beneath a sheen of high budget movie making. Dominique Fishback, who plays Hampton’s partner Deborah Johnson (now Akua Njeri), says she trusted King with Hampton’s legacy. “His confidence and ability to make an authentic story, but not at the cost of somebody’s life,” she said helped her feel more comfortable to make the acting choices she made. 

This big, complex movie with stakes bigger than any one person’s life is a big jump from King’s first movie, 2013’s Newlyweeds. That movie tells the story of a young couple in Brooklyn who smoke a lot of weed. It’s tender and funny, hitting the same notes as movies from other indie darling directors such as Joe Swanberg or the Duplass brothers. And it got decent buzz when it went around the festival circuit. The Film Independent Spirit Awards gave King the Someone to Watch Award, which came with a $25,000 grant.

But after that initial fanfare, King struggled to find buyers for the movie. “I was so depressed after making Newlyweeds,” he said. It was a movie starring two Black actors who no one knew. “And at that time, that was deemed worthless,” said King.

2013 wasn’t that long ago. But it was before what a friend of King’s ironically dubbed the Black Excellence Industrial Complex, when movie studios realized you could make a lot of money releasing films by and starring Black people — Selma, Moonlight, Black Panther and so on. The experience with Newlyweeds burnt King out on the idea of making another feature film. “I stopped caring,” he said. 

Judas and the Black Messiah producer, Charles D. King (no relation), didn’t know that about director Shaka King. As the head of Macro, which produces movies and TV shows by people of color including Judas, Charles King is possibly one of the biggest names in the Black Excellence Industrial Complex. From his perch as producer, he’s seen young directors struggle with getting the momentum going for a second movie — particularly women and people of color. So he wasn’t surprised King felt the same way. 

“It was before the #Oscarssowhite moment of 2015,” said King. “A lot’s happened since then. There’s much more of an openness and I think an understanding of the business opportunity there.”

After Newlyweeds, what tethered director King to the idea of moviemaking was a kind of silly, kind of outrageous idea he had rolling around in his head for a short satire, titled Mulignans, after the Italian slur for Black people that used to be heard frequently on the streets of Brooklyn. In it, King and two other actors play three Black guys who talk like they’re out of the Italian mobster movies King has such a fondness for. It was slightly inspired by his time growing up in a mostly Black part of Brooklyn, before going to school in South Brooklyn. There, he noticed that everyone — the Irish kids, the Greek kids, the Jewish kids, the Asian kids — all talked like the Italian kids. 

“And those kids were hilarious,” said King. “They were profane, they were quick witted — we weren’t friends — but I could appreciate their sense of humor.”

The movie has the spirit and feel of hanging out with your friends while it concisely makes points about gender politics, race and gentrification. It reminded King of the sheer fun of making something just to see if you can. “That movie saved me,” he said. “It saved me.”

King brought that energy to the challenge of making Judas and the Black Messiah, a movie about a Black radical anti-capitalist, within the very capitalist world of Hollywood. “I’m completely aware of the myriad of contradictions that exist not only to try and make a movie like this, but me just wanting to have the kind of career I want to have, and the politics that I have and all of those co-existing,” he said. 

Fred Hampton, Jr. was a consultant for the movie and on set during production. When I spoke with him, he said he was only just now able to watch the movie through the eyes of a regular audience member. He liked it well enough, though he wished they could’ve gotten some more of the politics in there. Then he smiled and said, “a revolutionary is never satisfied.”

Nina Gregory edited this story.

You’ll Never Look At Your ‘Good Neighbors’ The Same Way Again

Arts

by Gabino Iglesias

Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors is one of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I’ve ever read. Langan cuts to the heart of upper middle class lives like a skilled surgeon and exposes the rotten realities behind manicured lawns and perfect families, and the result is horrifically plausible.

Maple Street is a crescent of perfection in suburban Long Island. It’s a safe place where families tend to their Harvard-bound children, no one worries about mortgage or car payments, and everyone gets along splendidly. But there’s something dark and evil bubbling beneath the nice cars and bright smiles, and when the Wilde family moves into the neighborhood, everything changes. The Wildes are disruptive because they don’t fit in. Dad Arlo is a has-been rock star with arms covered in tattoos of demons that hide his track marks. Mom Gertie is a tall blonde with breast implants who used to be a beauty queen. The kids, Julia and Larry, are weird, loud, and foulmouthed.

Despite this, Rhea Schroeder, the queen of Maple Street — and a college professor unable to cope with her dark past — welcomes the Wildes and befriends Gertie. But when Rhea drunkenly shares too much with her new friend, she changes her mind: Gertie is now her enemy. Tensions ratchet up even further when a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and a few days later, Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls into the sinkhole and the façade finally collapses. During the search for Shelly, accusations against the Wildes fly, physical altercations erupt, and lies eventually lead to murder.

Maple Street is a crescent of perfection in suburban Long Island … But there’s something dark and evil bubbling beneath the nice cars and bright smiles.

Despite being mostly about upper middle class white Americans, Good Neighbors is anchored in otherness. The Wildes know they don’t belong. They understand they’re constantly “breaking tacit rules,” but they don’t know what those rules are. And when Rhea turns against them, she knows just where to stick the dagger in, because she knows the rest of the neighbors consider them “ghetto.” In the absence of race, class is a perfect excuse to hate. The Wildes don’t dress nicely, their car is old, and they weren’t born into money like everyone else, so they’re perpetual outsiders whose differences make them lesser. Using strange events that preceded Shelley’s falling into the sinkhole, Rhea accuses Arlo of raping her daughter, and no one jumps to his defense. It only gets worse from there.

Langan has created an entire mythos around “the Maple Street Murders,” peppering her narrative with magazine, newspaper, and scholarly articles about the event. These writings shift in tone and author and often include interviews that offer different perspectives on the murders — and sometimes perpetuate lies. Here’s an excerpt from Believing What You See: Untangling the Maple Street Murders that discusses Gertie’s role in Shelly’s (nonexistent) sexual abuse by her husband:

Langan’s unflinching prose obliterates suburbia’s shiny veneer and makes Good Neighbors an uncomfortable read. These people live in beautiful houses with air conditioning where everything is clean, they have nice jobs, and their kids never have to worry about their clothing “being someone else’s hand-me-downs.” However, even those kids can see beyond that. As Charlie, the 13-year old son of the Walshes — who live two houses down from the Wildes — grumbles: “It’s a lie. There is no perfect.” Loveless marriages, spying on neighbors, lies, physical and psychological abuse, hidden crimes, pill addictions, mounting frustration, and dissatisfaction brew behind closed doors.

This is a story about murder, but it’s also much more. This is narrative about childhood trauma and motherhood and how both shape people. Narratives about suburbia’s rotten core aren’t new, but Langan brings them into the present and pushes them into the future. In fact, the murders take place in 2028, and the book written about them is published 15 years after, proving ugliness under pretty facades is a perennial problem.

Good Neighbors shows how easily the discourse can go from disliking someone to spilling blood, and how those involved don’t feel responsible as long as they’re not alone: “Consent given, the inchoate scheme took form, and so many contributed to its birth that none felt wholly responsible. They were passengers, riding the momentum of something greater than themselves.”

“We had a problem on the block and the cops wouldn’t solve it. So we solved our own problem,” says one of the neighbors — and he could easily be your neighbor. That plausibility is what makes this novel such a harrowing read. You will read this and be enthralled, but you will never look at your neighbors the same way again.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.