The Neighborhood Watch
When Claire Brennan flees an abusive marriage and moves to Meadowbrook Estates with her fourteen-year-old son Ethan, the gated community seems like salvation. Perfect lawns. Zero crime. Neighbors who care. But safety, she soon discovers, has a price.
The Neighborhood Watch isn't just vigilant, it's omnipresent. Cameras disguised as birdhouses. Mandatory behavior reports. Community meetings where residents vote on "corrections" for rule violations. When Ethan breaks curfew, the Watch takes him for eight hours of "intervention." He returns silent, shaking, fundamentally changed.
Claire begins to uncover the truth: Meadowbrook's perfection is maintained through systematic violence. Corrections escalate from psychological torture to elimination. Dissenters disappear. Deaths are ruled accidents. And every atrocity is authorized democratically, forty-seven hands raised in agreement, transforming neighbors into executioners and consensus into weapon.
As Claire attempts to expose the Watch, she faces an impossible choice: submit to save her son, or resist and risk everything. But resistance means confronting not just the Watch's leadership, but an entire community invested in maintaining the lie that violence is protection, that surveillance is care, that democracy makes murder legitimate.
From Nathan Graves comes a novel about the ordinary evil hiding in plain sight, in HOA bylaws, community meetings, and the particular terror of belonging to a place that will vote to eliminate you if you question its authority.
The Neighborhood Watch is a haunting exploration of how fear transforms communities into prisons, how good intentions pave roads to atrocity, and how the most dangerous monsters are the ones we create in the name of safety.
Content Warning: Contains depictions of psychological torture, community violence, and trauma. Reader discretion advised.
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