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The Girl Next Door (1989) by Jack Ketchum

7/19/2017

3 Comments

 
Picture
++1/2

Horror fan favorite about the awful things that happen to a young girl sent to live with her aunt after her parents are killed in an accident. Based on real events -- or "inspired by," if you prefer, since Ketchum lowers the girl's age, sets the story a decade earlier (in the 50's, though there's very little sense of period), and introduces as narrator a boy who may or may not be the girl's deliverance. Definitely a page-turner, but it's as if Ketchum studied the real life case -- in which a woman, her children, and some neighbor kids torture a 16-year-old girl for months until she succumbs to her injuries and mercifully dies -- and came away with little more than the idea that torture is exciting. Certainly the author has no interest in making any of this comprehensible: the characters are sketchy and facile and his only point of view seems to be that cowards do cowardly things. In some sense, much of this really happened -- but that doesn't make any of it believable. Torture porn, pure and simple. Made into a movie in 2007.

3 Comments
Bookstooge link
7/20/2017 07:33:36 pm

Well, that is depressing...

Reply
Brian
7/23/2017 05:38:43 am

Was this one you were thinking of reading? I got curious when I kept seeing it on internet "best of" horror lists. Then more so when it took me forever to find it at the used bookstores I go to. But then as usual I didn't look into it at all, so I had no idea what it was about. It was funny when, less than a third of the way in, I suddenly recognized the story.

Of course, now -- even though it wasn't very good -- I have to start looking around for the movie....

Reply
Bookstooge link
7/23/2017 06:55:35 am

No, it wasn't. My "horror" reads tend to either be accidental or when I read 1 stephen king book a year in October.




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