5+ Stars for The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum

Stephen King calls Jack Ketchum is one of the best in the business and after reading The Girl Next Door and Offspring, I'm inclined to believe it. Especially, The Girl Next Door, a book based a real life terror.  Even before I got to the author's notes at the back, I knew this story, read about it, and was disgusted by it, hated the woman that orchestrated the torture of the young fourteen-year-old girl utilizing her own sons and other neighborhood children. The true story was set back in the 1960's and pretty much happened the way Ketchum depicted it.

Summary:

The Girl Next Door is a dark and twisted story told through the eyes of a preteen boy. Set in the 1950s, the book mixes true life experiences from author Jack Ketchum with a fictionalized account of one of America's grizzliest true crime stories. With an engaging story and believable characters, this is a book that no one will want to put down.

The Girl Next Door follows a young man named David and the relationship he shares with a teenage girl named Meg. Meg lives next door with her younger sister and an older woman, Ruth, who also has three sons. Ruth is the type of woman whom everyone considers part of the gang and teenagers love hanging out with because she gives them alcohol and lets them run loose. Once David discovers the dark side of Ruth and the horrendous things she does to Meg, he must make a decision to stand up to Ruth or stick with the crowd.

Made into a hit horror film, The Girl Next Door is a harrowing look at what happens behind closed doors. Ketchum writes an unflinching portrait of small-town America, showing that what people do in public does not necessarily represent the way they act in private. From the moment David meets Meg to the last page of the novel, you will find yourself wrapped up in David's story and hoping he does the right thing.

The Girl Next Door is an introspective story that will have you taking a second look at your neighbors and questioning what you would do in the same situation.

Review:

This story is so horrific you can't believe it's based on a true story, but it is. I read this book in one day, rooting for David to do the right thing, and rooting for Meg and Susan to find safety. Ketchum's approach to this story work to dig at your heart, your inner most fears. It is done in a very poetic way. The story is told by twelve-year-old David, so you don't see the complete horror of everything, but you see enough, and you see it escalate in the aunt, how she slowly begins to punish the girls, from taking away food, water, and then beating them. It gets much worse when Meg goes to the basement and is locked away. Yet, you see the strength of Meg and her endurance, and need to protect her little sister no matter what happens to her. You see her goodness, and pain inside and out. You empathize with them.

But you sympathize with David, understand the time he lives in and how he rationalizes allowing this monster behavior out of his neighbors. In the end, you can't hate him, because David has been tortured too, felt pain of standing by and letting it all happen. 

Now as for the boys committing the atrocities, I think of them as right out of Lord of the Flies, boys free to give into their emerging man, worse their 'normal' emerging sadistic tendencies such as boiling ants, or perhaps drowning the neighborhood cat - except in their case this was Meg, a real live girl treated like an animal. It broke my heart.

Overall, the aunt was the worse, and who I hated the most. She was clinically crazy, slowly eaten away by her own bitterness at being left by the father of her three boys. She felt strapped down, imprisoned and rationalized she was doing some good by Meg and Susan so that they didn't one day suffer her fate, but the truth was I believed her to be jealous of Meg and the goodness and light this young girl's future held. She was everything the aunt wished she still had, youth, talent, and attractiveness. The aunt crushed all of it, because it was not hers. I hated her for it. A young girl should be nurtured, and guided into womanhood without feeling ugly about growing into it. 

Again, I hated her, still do. Ketchum does a great job of painting her, an excellent job of stacking the plot elements to the top until you reach the final climatic ending that does. not. disappoint. The Girl Next Door is woven well, characterization, plot, it has it all, but sadly it will break your heart. I cried, and I think for the next month I'm going to have to unknot my stomach and read something happy.