Regarding The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum said he wanted readers to feel guilty for turning the page. He wanted readers to feel complicit in the crime, to make readers feel like they were one of the people in the neighborhood who knew what was happening, but didn’t do anything to stop it. He definitely succeeded in that.

I almost stopped reading this several times, but I knew if I didn’t finish it, it would continue to haunt me. So I instead opted to read through it as fast as possible to get it over with. It’s so much more horrifying when you learn that it was based on a true story.

Things ramp up gradually. As I was reading, I kept thinking to myself it can’t get much worse, but then it does. It gets so much worse and it keeps getting worse. Ketchum actually tones down the extent of the torture compared to what happened in real-life. There are also scenes his narrator mercifully refuses to describe.

Reading this book made me feel like absolute crap, so while it’s definitely well-written, I can’t recommend anybody read it. I don’t want you (whoever you are) to feel as awful as I did while I was reading this. I know that usually when reviewers warn readers away from a horror novel, it’s actually a kind of dare, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I really mean it when I say your life will be happier if you skip this one. You already know how horrible some people can be. You don’t have to witness their atrocities close-up to condemn them.

Why would somebody write something like this? I suppose Ketchum wanted to wake readers up from their indifference. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye when this happens in our neighborhoods. If you know child abuse is happening, but don’t do anything to stop it, you’re complicit.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that society is different now than it was back in the 1950s and 60s. Back then, children were viewed as property. Most people believed parents or guardians could abuse children in their care as much as they wanted to. Even the police couldn’t do much to stop it.

I’m not saying this couldn’t happen today, but there are limits to how much abuse parents or guardians can get away with now. Abuse still happens, of course, but not as much as it used to.