Neighbors

by Michael H. Payne

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your neighbors.

For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic formerly isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals he meets.

Rolling his wheelchair out under the care of El Brujo, one of Haven's therapy cats, he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the humans, dogs, cats, crows, squirrels and others forced into the close proximity of the neighborhood. And when some of these neighbors begin acting in a most unneighborly fashion, Gus finds that he might be the only one capable of keeping events from spiraling completely out of control.

Some chapters of this work were published previously on the website Fur Affinity—thanks to Renee Carter Hall and Sean Silva for the prompts that inspired them—and the first three chapters were published in the anthology Bronies, edited by L. Lambert Lawson, Kazka Press, June, 2012. The cover art is by Tom Payne, www.eyeballpress.com

Michael H. Payne's stories have appeared in places like Asimov's SF magazine, the annual Sword & Sorceress collection, and the Writers of the Future contest anthology, and his novels have been published by Tor Books, Sofawolf Press, and "Hey, Your Nose is On Fire" Industries. Norman Spinrad has called his work "the sort of thing for which the word 'sui generis' was invented."

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

Also writes under AugieDog and Baal Bunny.

Reviews

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a great find, and quite unusual. A young man, paralyzed from the waist down, is hidden away by his wealthy, asshole father in a rehab facility. The neurological condition that tangles his speech somehow also gives him the ability to communicate with animals, and Gus ends up befriending the local neighborhood wildlife and pets, including cats, dogs, squirrels, and crows. As easily as Gus can speak with animals, however, he cannot with his fellow humans, and his animal friends agree to help him when a new girl moves to town.

This story was quite charming, and dealt with issues of disability and addiction with sensitivity. I was also pretty stoked that Gus was a fan of the cartoon ponies show, and apparently the author is as well. It brought to mind my own fascination with Twilight Sparkle when my kids were addicted to this show as they were growing up. And of course, that theme song that is now stuck in my head as I type these words.

[Arturo Serrano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote about this book for the Ignyte-winning, Hugo-winning blog Nerds of a Feather:

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/12/...

[Woman Who Weaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was drawn in by the cover. I got bogged down in the middle, so I skipped to the end, and the ending made me curious about how we got there, so I went back and read the rest of it. It's a very unusual story and there were moments of real insight. I am going to take a look at the author's other work/

[Diane Mendenhall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book kind of snuck up on me. I didn't know what to expect and didn't have any expectations about it. It started out like most stories do but soon the characters had my attention. By the end of the book I found that I want to know more about Gus, El Brujo, and all the other delightful characters in the book. The drama with a couple of neighbors added to my desire to learn more,