Suburban Noir (aka Middle Class People Behaving Badly)

[Reed]

Popular tropes include:

 

-a pretty, seemingly perfect housewife...with a secret~!

-a handsome, seemingly perfect husband...with a mistress~!

-a teenager who may or may not be a sociopathic murderer

-unreliable narrators

-a big twist that changes everything.

 

Probably the best ones I've read are Defending Jacob, The Dinner, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and Little Children. The Girl on the Train is great because literally most of it is narrated from the point of view of a crazy drunk girl stalking her ex and his new family.

[Ryan]

They should ALL be in the book for it to succeed.

[Reed]

I've never been an affluent married person living in the posh suburbs.

 

Is anyone on here one? Is it all murder, sex and drugs behind the thin veneer of respectability? 

[Cliff Hanger]

I have never been affluent on my own, but I'm fairly sure my parents drowned a hooker to christen the swimming pool they bought. It was kind of a rite of passage in our area.

[Jingus]

Little Children was one of those few moments where I thought the movie was better than the book.  That seems to happen surprisingly often in noir-land, doesn't it?  Blade Runner, The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly...

 

 

I spent my teen years going to high school in a rich neighborhood.  Yeah, there's some dark shit going on underneath the surface; but that's not ALL there is, of course.  That would be like expecting every day walking down the sidewalk in Los Angeles suddenly turns into a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.  But here's a couple of anecdotes.  

 

One day at high school, we had one of those half-days where everyone got out early.  I stayed afterwards because I was in a one-act play that was in the rehearsal process, and we were trying to shine up this terrible old "comedic" script with cheesy borscht-belt punchlines about people nonsensically impersonating each other and stealing diamonds; it was called The Family Jewels, and that genital pun is pretty much the level of humor you got with that shit.  Ah, government-controlled public high school, whaddya gonna do.  In fact, I had recently broken my toe (left pinky toe, shattered to splinters when fleeing from my stepdad who was humorously torturing me with his impression of the sound that an electric zit-removing machine makes) and was acting in sandals; which was a godsend that my character was supposed to be an Arabian sheikh (who was actually a Texan cowboy, don't ask) so I didn't have to squeeze my aching foot into something less forgiving than the Birkenstocks that I sported on the stage.  While either limping around or more likely sitting my fat ass down, we heard some kind of commotion outside; our theatrical stage was one of those that doubled as a gymnasium, with these cool retractable bleachers (that contained comfortable stadium seats; once again, rich neighborhood) that folded all the way into the wall to allow for a full-court basketball area.  This was important because this was Tennessee and athletics are pushed stupidly hard, and apparently just one gym isn't enough for these white-collar rednecks.  Anyway, point is, the way the building was constructed, this gymstageum is right next to the junior parking lot.  (Yes, the juniors and seniors had their own segregated parking lots, complete with pay-per-spot saved individual spaces.  Once again, RICH NEIGHBORHOOD.)  

 

So to get to the point, on this half-a-day outside this gymnasium, there was a dealership's wet dream of cars lined up to pick up their kids.  We had buses too, but I think maybe the buses didn't run on half-days, I can't remember (all I remember about the buses was the panicked rush to find YOUR bus in a double-stacked line of identical yellow demons with nothing but an unfairly small number painted on the side to designate the differences).  This day, the parking lot must've been double-full of parents, who in this neighborhood were all doctors and lawyers and country music executives.  That must have been one hilarious audience to the GANGLAND STABBING which occurred that day, as one kid I didn't know shanked another kid I didn't know, repeatedly, in full view of everyone within line of sight.  Reportedly tore the victim's jacket to fuckin' shreds, multiple abdomen wounds, nasty shit.  In the parking lot, in broad daylight, in front of literally hundreds of witnesses.  

 

Being inside the gymstageum with all the other theater nerds (I think this might've been the one play where the student director, a skittish young ginger fellow with a tracheotomy scar, had a nervous breakdown and ran away to Florida, leaving the rest of us to carry on in his absence) I was cheerfully oblivious to what the fuck was happening outside.  We didn't know until somebody came in to give us a garbled account of the news, at which point... shit, I can't remember.  Did we scatter like roaches to every available phone, calling our parents to come pick us up from rehearsal sooner than anticipated?  Did we do that "The Play Must Go On!" thing and just keep rehearsing like nothing happened?  I haven't been able to text anybody yet who DIDN'T decide to get into the damn wrestling business and thus ruin their memory via the usual suspects.  

 

Another anecdote later, one that's less action-y but much creepier.  

 

[Reed]

Defending Jacob is great because it's essentially a courtroom version of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

 

There is clearly something up with the kid, but the evidence against him is hardly solid...so you pretty much spend most of the book trying to weigh up the evidence against him.