Book Review: The Association

Spoilers!

Nobody loves homeowners’ associations; everybody who lives in homeowners associations loves them. That’s the paradox, after all. People feign frustration with homeowners’ associations, yet opt to live in places with homeowners’ associations. This is what economists call “revealed preferences,” which is to say, people prefer being within a homeowners’ association — and whatever it may be offering from the accrual of dues — versus living outside of a homeowners’ association. Nonetheless, I’m not sure anyone would want to live in Bonita Vista and be governed by the homeowners’ association in Bentley Little’s 2001 book, The Association. This particular Association not only wields tyranny over petty matters, but is willing to enforce its tyranny with escalating threats, stalking, voyeurism, indentured servitude, and violence.

Barry and Maureen are two yuppies from California who move out to Utah and the aforementioned Bonita Vista in Utah to start over. He’s a horror novelist and she’s an accountant. As Barry readily admits, while he wants to be a “conscientious liberal,” revealed preference has something else to say. There is a class divide between what he wants (the gated community Bonita Vista offers) and living with poorer, uneducated townsfolk in Utah. The homeowners’ association for Bonita Vista is quite literally on an island of sorts: the land is unincorporated, so, the dues pays for everything they need in the community a local government normally would provide. But it’s ominous and foreboding the moment Barry and Maureen arrive. A dead cat is in their mailbox. That should have been the first glaring red flag! Instead, they pass it off as unruly teenagers.

The homeowners’ association quite literally lives and dies (heh) by the Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions, or C, C, and Rs. Little intersperses each escalating infraction Barry and Maureen make with where the restriction or prohibition is listed within the C, C, and Rs. That was fun. First, it’s that they can’t have yard sales or garage sales. Then it’s the micromanaging of their gardening. Already frustrated by the Association, Barry and Maureen make fast friends with Ray and Liz, their neighbors, who are also anti-Association, along with a few others. Eventually, the Board of Directors of the Association comes for Ray in his home and kills him. They make it look like a shower accident.

And the aforementioned class divide between the town and Bonita Vista bubbles up, when it’s suspected and then abundantly clear, that the Association, which prohibits pets on its Properties, is poisoning the dogs and cats within the town to “extend their influence.” Two children are killed, one seemingly accidentally from ingesting the poison and another had his head smashed in, so, it was murder. The townspeople, who were originally friendly to Barry, who was using a spot in town to write his novel, turn against him, associating him with the Association. There’s a West Side Story-like scrap between the townspeople and the Association’s “volunteers.” The volunteers are those who are indentured servants “paying off their debts” to the Association by doing their bidding, including fighting. They’ve also begun to pay down their debts through body disfiguration: cutting off ears, arms, legs, etc. This Association is sick.

Despite all of that thus far, including the Interior Committee of the Association breaking into their home to perform an inspection, Barry and Maureen stay. Out of pride. Out of “not letting the bastards win.” Whatever the case. It even becomes clear the Association is privately recording residents on “BVTV,” Bonita Vista Television. At one point, they even show footage on BVTV of Barry and Maureen making love. Still, they stay! Barry has his friends and their wives comes to Bonita Vista as reinforcements. One goes missing, then a married couple goes missing. The last couple, who are Hispanic, are threatened for violating the C, C, and Rs against “minorities” on the Properties (despite, y’know, the gated community being called Bonita Vista, Spanish for “pretty view”). They eventually get the hell out of there. But not Barry and Maureen! In some respects, I thought they were the dumbest characters imaginable. The abnormal and the illegal came to be normalized by them out of, again, pride or lack of imagination, I suppose, on how to abscond from the Association. I surely thought Maureen’s accountant prowess would assist them in wiggling out from underneath the thumb of the Association, but alas. Many residents within Bonita Vista not acquiesce to the dictates of the Association, but are willing, cheering participants of the draconian, violent, fascistic manifestations therein.

The worst occurs when Maureen finds out she’s pregnant and children are forbidden by the C, C, and Rs. Barry leaves to take care of his sister in Philadelphia, who was struck by a hit-and-run driver (probably an extension of the Association), and Maureen, again, stupidly decides to stay. A man with a coat hanger breaks into her home intent upon performing an abortion on her. Liz saves her by plunging a knife into his back and killing him. (Liz had previously given into the Association to “make it stop,” but had a change of heart.)

In the climax, Barry returns to Bonita Vista and is invited to meet the Board President, Jasper Calhoun, at his home. The Board, including Jasper, from the get-go have been characterized and depicted by Little as off in some indefinable way. They’re not exactly alien or demonic; Barry reasons they started out as human, but the Board turned them into otherworldly creatures of a kind, with their bodies held together by their regal robes. Anyhow, Jasper surmises that Barry would like a spot on the Board, to challenge Jasper’s seat. To do so, he must fight Jasper to the death Gladiator-style and in true Gladiator fashion, in front of the whole town in an arena. He does. Barry is nearly killed before he realizes the only way to defeat Jasper is to turn the C, C, and Rs, and thus, the community, back upon him. He argues Jasper violated the C, C, and Rs by wearing a robe in public and then, when his wig is knocked off, by being bald in public. The community turns into a mob that kills all the Board members. Barry is officially the new Board President. Of course, he doesn’t want it. He leaves Bonita Vista for good. In the Epilogue, Barry and Maureen move to a desolate part of a town far from any gated community.

The Association was my first Little book. I’m always happy to give established horror writers like him, or emerging ones, a chance. I thought the book had a great premise: turning something a lot of people can relate to — a homeowners’ association’s petty tyrannies and micromanaging — into horror fodder. It was silly, particularly the way Barry and Maureen normalized the abnormal (but perhaps that was part of Little’s message, too). However, Little himself used Barry being a horror writer to meta acknowledge the silliness and absurdities of it. Barry regularly thinks the events of Bonita Vista could be part of one of his horror novels. You also could have shaved a good 100 pages from Little’s novel and not lost anything. All that said, I enjoyed the book. Horror happening to normal people and them having to navigate it is always intriguing, and the climax was clever with Barry turning the C, C, and Rs back on the Board. I’ll certainly read more Little.