5/6/2024
What I find most bewildering about this book is the number of reviewers–a minority, certainly, but a significant one–who complain that the book was not entertaining.
You can fuck right off with that.
Why in the world would you expect a book about the brutal abuse, torture, and murder of a teenage girl to be entertaining? Ick.
I agree the book is not entertaining. And if you read the public statements Jack Ketchum made over the years about its creation, it’s clear that he wasn't concerned about that. He wrote the book because the stories he had read about the real-life case had stuck in his craw. He was interested in confronting the beast, in understanding how and why such horrid things happened.
More broadly, Ketchum, perhaps more than any other modern horror writer, was focused on horrifying his readers. Generally, he sought to do this by presenting readers with plain, straight-forward accounts of human cruelty and brutality. To force us to look, whether we wanted to or not, at the ghastly things people do. To force us to contemplate. To understand. Ketchum’s books are uncomfortable reads designed to disturb. It’s no surprise that The Girl Next Door is a nasty bit of work; the only thing that surprised me here was that there were, indeed, a couple of scenes when Ketchum stepped back and did not describe what happened in detail. I don't recall that I've seen him do that before, although given the material in question here I certainly understand his choices.
The brutality of the book is clear, but it is also nothing terribly new. The real power of The Girl Next Door derives from something else. Ketchum understood the importance of perspective, and what fuels things here is his choice of young Davey, the pre-teen middle schooler next door, as the narrator. (The book would be entirely different, and probably far less interesting, if written from the point of view of either the psychologically-unbalanced bully Ruth or her long-suffering victim Meg.) Through Davey we get the confusion of a young mind grappling with right and wrong, with lust and fear, with the desire for belonging and the desire for power.
Davey does a lot of shit wrong before getting some stuff right, and through his experience Ketchum explores how average people become complicit in gawdawful things. Every time the tension in Davey’s life starts to flag, Ruth or the boys commit some new outrage that takes away his mental equilibrium again. Is it surprising that it takes him most of the summer to try to help Meg? Or is it more surprising that he tries at all? I don’t know. That uncertainty, and the complex portrait of Davey that foregrounds his moral ambivalence, is Ketchum’s primary achievement in this dark, disturbing book.
What I find most bewildering about this book is the number of reviewers–a minority, certainly, but a significant one–who complain that the book was not entertaining.
You can fuck right off with that.
Why in the world would you expect a book about the brutal abuse, torture, and murder of a teenage girl to be entertaining? Ick.
I agree the book is not entertaining. And if you read the public statements Jack Ketchum made over the years about its creation, it’s clear that he wasn't concerned about that. He wrote the book because the stories he had read about the real-life case had stuck in his craw. He was interested in confronting the beast, in understanding how and why such horrid things happened.
More broadly, Ketchum, perhaps more than any other modern horror writer, was focused on horrifying his readers. Generally, he sought to do this by presenting readers with plain, straight-forward accounts of human cruelty and brutality. To force us to look, whether we wanted to or not, at the ghastly things people do. To force us to contemplate. To understand. Ketchum’s books are uncomfortable reads designed to disturb. It’s no surprise that The Girl Next Door is a nasty bit of work; the only thing that surprised me here was that there were, indeed, a couple of scenes when Ketchum stepped back and did not describe what happened in detail. I don't recall that I've seen him do that before, although given the material in question here I certainly understand his choices.
The brutality of the book is clear, but it is also nothing terribly new. The real power of The Girl Next Door derives from something else. Ketchum understood the importance of perspective, and what fuels things here is his choice of young Davey, the pre-teen middle schooler next door, as the narrator. (The book would be entirely different, and probably far less interesting, if written from the point of view of either the psychologically-unbalanced bully Ruth or her long-suffering victim Meg.) Through Davey we get the confusion of a young mind grappling with right and wrong, with lust and fear, with the desire for belonging and the desire for power.
Davey does a lot of shit wrong before getting some stuff right, and through his experience Ketchum explores how average people become complicit in gawdawful things. Every time the tension in Davey’s life starts to flag, Ruth or the boys commit some new outrage that takes away his mental equilibrium again. Is it surprising that it takes him most of the summer to try to help Meg? Or is it more surprising that he tries at all? I don’t know. That uncertainty, and the complex portrait of Davey that foregrounds his moral ambivalence, is Ketchum’s primary achievement in this dark, disturbing book.