A review by moris_deri
The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum
2.0
For more than 30 years now, this book has been loved and hated in equal measures for its depiction of brutal scenes of torture. My sin is approaching it having read the true case on which it is based – the story of Sylvia Likens. That said, I am rating this book purely on the merit of the content without calling into question the morality and ethics of fictionalizing real-life pain and suffering in the name of literary consumption.
So here goes nothing: compared to the series of somatic and mental abuses that Miss Likens went through in the hands of Gertrude and her evil seven dwarves, The Girl Next Door is mildly shocking. Fans of extreme/body horror would find this rather underwhelming, but I’m not going to spoil this for anyone who hasn’t read it. The storytelling is delivered in a rather flat and colorless manner. There was so much potential for psychological tropes to be deployed to create character depth and a sense of dread and desperation, yet Ketchum obviously wanted to write something that is for mass consumption (yay capitalism!), so it felt like it’s targeted to a YA audience.
The thing is, if you want to appropriate (expropriate?, not sure which is correct, English is a foreign language to me) someone else’s tragedy, you better tell it well, and not undercut or undersell the victim’s trauma save for a few creative decisions. At one point I thought I was afraid to continue reading. It turned out I forgot to take my pills for anxiety. Blue-balled, but self-inflicted.
So this was a 300 pages of major disappointment, but to those new to the genre, I understand why this was an either or and not an in-betweener. Anybody in my circle read this before?
A solid 2/5* read.
So here goes nothing: compared to the series of somatic and mental abuses that Miss Likens went through in the hands of Gertrude and her evil seven dwarves, The Girl Next Door is mildly shocking. Fans of extreme/body horror would find this rather underwhelming, but I’m not going to spoil this for anyone who hasn’t read it. The storytelling is delivered in a rather flat and colorless manner. There was so much potential for psychological tropes to be deployed to create character depth and a sense of dread and desperation, yet Ketchum obviously wanted to write something that is for mass consumption (yay capitalism!), so it felt like it’s targeted to a YA audience.
The thing is, if you want to appropriate (expropriate?, not sure which is correct, English is a foreign language to me) someone else’s tragedy, you better tell it well, and not undercut or undersell the victim’s trauma save for a few creative decisions. At one point I thought I was afraid to continue reading. It turned out I forgot to take my pills for anxiety. Blue-balled, but self-inflicted.
So this was a 300 pages of major disappointment, but to those new to the genre, I understand why this was an either or and not an in-betweener. Anybody in my circle read this before?
A solid 2/5* read.