Fiction Book #1 in 2009 – The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum

From the back of the book:
Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons – and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A by with a very adult decision to make…

My thoughts:

• This book was recommended as a great horror novel on a book forum. I don’t usually read horror, but thought I’d branch out a little to read something I don’t usually read. So I had no clue what this book was really about, apart from what it said on the back of the book (didn’t read any reviews on amazon.com beforehand, which I usually do)

• Very, very disturbing

• I was disgusted as I read… and disgusted at myself for keeping on reading. It was a very quick read (finish in a couple of hours), but there were several times I almost stopped but couldn’t help but kept on reading

• Kept wondering why anybody would write a novel like so. I mean, who would come up with stuff like that (won’t go into details what the “stuff” is so I won’t spoil it for those who do want to read it). Got a better understanding when I read Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door at the end of the book. So it was loosely based on a true crime story (for those of you who are interested, goggle Sylvia Likens or Gertrude Baniszewski.) And I suppose, sometimes true life is stranger (or more disturbing?) than fiction. Ketchum wrote that “I eventually made the decision to soften some of what happened and leave some out altogether.”

• It is a book I can’t rate – is it effective as an horror book? Yes, because I was disturbed by it, and I had read true crime / forensic books etc before. And I kept thinking I hope no one made any movies based on the book, or the true crime itself. Well, there IS a movie based on the book, AND another movied based on the crime… guess I won’t be watching those. What I visualized as I read the book was terrifying enough. Would I recommend this book then? No. But you are old enough to make your own decision

• I did learn something though, about writing technique, that Jack Ketchum shared in Author’s Note. He chose to use a first-person voice for a reason, which he explained on p.339 (soft cover). I thought it was interesting to read why he’d taken this approach. I’ll copy it here as I don’t think I can paraphrase it:

“I used a first-person voice for one thing, with the boy next door as narrator. He’s a troubled but not insensitive kid who vacillates between his fascination at the very license involved and what his empathy’s telling him. He sees plenty. But not everything. Which allowed me to sketch a few things rather than go at them close-up and full-throttle.

He’s also speaking some thirty years later. He’s an adult now so he can edit. So at one point when the going gets roughest I have him say, Sorry, I am just not going to show you this. Imagine it for yourself if you care and dare to. Me, I am not helping.

The first-person voice in a suspense book can automatically shift the reader’s sympathy directly to the object of violence… {cut}. You know whoever’s talking to you is going to survive so you don’t tend to worry much about his physical safety. (Though you can worry about his moral safety and hopefully that’s what happens here.) But if it’s done right you’ll worry about the safety of the people he cares about. In this case, The Girl Next Door and her sister.“