The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

Colquitt and Walter Kennedy are horrified when construction starts on the wooded vacant lot next door to their suburban Atlanta home. They worry that their routine of dinner parties and drinks on the patio will be disturbed, and that the ultra-modern home going up will ruin the character of their sleepy, traditional Southern neighborhood. However, when they meet the charming young couple who are moving in and their charismatic architect, they warm to the idea and even the new house.

Then a series of disturbing tragedies begin to visit the couple in the house next door until they move away, their relationship broken. The house goes up for sale, and troubled Anita and her husband move in. Anita begins to report bizarre incidents when she is home alone, but surely they are merely the product of her fragile emotional state? Colquitt and Walter watch again as their neighbor’s lives are ruined, and it begins to seem to them that something in the house is changing its inhabitants, bringing out the worst in them. Then a third couple moves in and terrible things happen to them, too. Rational Colquitt struggles to explain what is happening next door as madness and murder plague her once-peaceful neighborhood. What lengths will she and Walter go to to protect themselves and their home? Is there even a way to stop what’s happening?

This is the perfect haunted house story, and nothing like anything else you’ll read this Halloween.