A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Boredom won’t be a problem any longer.Ĭrackling with tension, and the sound of pages turning, as twist after twist sweeps away each hypothesis you come up with about what happened in Anna’s past and what fresh hell is unfolding now.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Not long after, his mother herself shows up…and then Anna witnesses something almost too shocking to be real happening in their living room. Both the game of chess and noir movie plots- Rear Window, in particular-will become spookily apt metaphors for the events that unfold when the teenage son of her new neighbors knocks on her door to deliver a gift from his mother. To fight boredom, she’s got online chess and a huge collection of DVDs she has most of Hitchcock memorized. Anna’s psychiatrist and physical therapist make house calls a tenant in her basement pinch-hits as a handyman. As she explains to fellow sufferers in her online support group, food and medication (not to mention cases of wine) can be delivered to your door your housecleaner can take out the trash. She speaks to her husband and daughter on the phone-they've moved out because 'the doctors say too much contact isn't healthy'-and conducts her relationships with her neighbors wholly through the zoom lens of her Nikon D5500.

Following a mysterious accident, Anna is suffering from agoraphobia so severe that she hasn't left her house in months. Anna Fox already knows their names, employment histories, how much they paid for their house, and anything else you can find out using a search engine. “The Miller home across the street-abandon hope, all ye who enter here-is one of five townhouses that I can survey from the south-facing windows of my own.” A new family is moving in on her Harlem street, and Dr. A lonely woman in New York spends her days guzzling merlot, popping pills, and spying on the neighbors-until something she sees sucks her into a vortex of terror.

The woman in the window novel