![]() Which makes the following descent the more upsetting. ![]() Cute, sweet, well-done, a yearning without knowing quite what one is yearning for. Her husband left the family years earlier, running off with another woman (which explains some of her future behavior towards Meg).ĭavid becomes smitten with Meg in a not-quite-romantic way he's three years younger than her anyway, but spends some nice, memorable moments with her early in the story. Ruth Chandler, a distant relation to the Loughlin girls, middle-aged, a heavy smoker and drinker but not without her looks, is well-known to all the kids living on the tree-lined, dead-end street as the parent who will give beers to them while they hang out with her own pre-teen sons Willie, Woofer, and Donny. The whole story, without faltering, of when teenage Meg Loughlin and her 11-year-old sister Susan come to live with David's next-door neighbors, the Chandlers, after the girls' parents are killed in a car crash. Pondering his three failed marriages, he attempts to tell the story. His regret and sadness and confusion set everything in motion. It's told in first person by David, 30 years after the horrific events, which occurred when he was about 12 years old. He presents it all in plain strong prose that neither titillates nor overstates he is in command of his words and images in a way a cheap and foolish writer - whose ranks in the horror genre are legion - could only ever dream. Ketchum is, for better or worse, a reliable and insightful guide as he delves into these places of heartlessness and cruelty found not in the supernatural or the extraterrestrial but, well, literally, next door. While some readers, if not most, may balk at the depths to which Ketchum goes in "recreating" what happened, he fills out his book with enough convincing details so that the matter never seems exploited or cheapened. The Girl Next Door is loosely based on the mind-curdling 1965 torture/murder case of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens. Which isn't to say it isn't deserved, because it is. None of his other vintage-era books, Off Season (1980), Cover (1987), or She Wakes (1989), look familiar to me, and he didn't start getting nominated for the Bram Stoker Award till the mid-'90s by which time I'd stopped reading modern horror, so it seems the book's reputation grew as a result of the reprints and the internet. Now, I hadn't even heard of Ketchum or this book until the last five or six years, I guess around the time it was reprinted by Leisure Books. It was the third novel from Dallas Mayr, written under his now-famous pseudonym Jack Ketchum. Whew, where to begin? The Girl Next Door has, in the near quarter-century since its publication, achieved a notoriety few other modern horror novels can match.
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