This is one of the most brutal and disturbing books I've read. This is a literary equivalent to Funny Games (the Haneke movie, if you haven't seen it, you need to) in that he makes you the reader complicit in the cruelty you're reading about.
What makes it all the worse is that it's so well written you can't put it down, can't look away from the car crash brutality playing out on the page.
It takes its time setting things up. It's chapter 25 before the really nasty stuff kicks in. The previous 24 chapters set up the characters intimately. We know these people, the first person narrator, David, talking as his 30 something self, describing his meeting and burgeoning friendship with Meg, the eoponymous girl next door, and Meg herself. These are hugely likeable characters even if David is ocasionally as selfish and spiteful as pre-teen boys are wont to be. He's done some bad things with the gang he hangs around with, but he's basically a good kid.
If you have a likeable character, the worst thing you can do to them in a narrative is do them incredible harm, right?
Nope. You can also make your nice pleasant lead chracter an accomplice to the evil at work. With the personable and likeable first person narration, we're watching everything and not doing anything about it either. This is where Ketchum is Funny-Gamesing us. One of the main points of tension in this book is wondering when or if young David is going to crack. We understand his passivity but we're screaming at him to do something for gods sake before it's too late.
The story is very similar in a lot of ways to Mendal Johnson's equally notorious Let's go Play at the Adams. I wonder if they were based on the same real life crime. A group of children on the cusp of their teens torture a local girl for their own pleasure. In this case, also for the pleasure of the girl's guardian, her aunt Ruth with whom she's been sent to live afetr her parents died in a car crash.
This is vastly superior to Mendal Johnson's book though. It's a long time since I read that book but I remember that it felt gratuitous for the most part. Nothing in this book does. Ketchum uses the first person narrative to avoid giving every last detail of what's happening. Things happen to Meg while he's not there that we learn of second hand. He tells enough that we know what's happened, but without gloating over the detail. There's even one chapter where the narrator refuses entirely to describe what he's seen - for which I was eternally grateful.
The prose is direct and concise. Chapter 24 is only one sentence long, but that one sentence is possibly the most chilling in the book, because it foreshadows all the bad things to come - in only 7 words.
I feel more sorry for Meg than I do for any fictional character I've read about. She's introduced so well and her personality so well drawn that when things turn nasty, we feel it. And that's what horror is supposed to do.
I hate when a writer gives a cast of characters that we'd be happy to see killed off and then just kills them one by one, it can be fun, but it's never scary. For horror to work, you build a sympathetic cast and it's the people you like that you do the bad things to. It's far more effective.
That's exactly what Ketchum has done here. This is the reason why this book has the reputation it has. Not only did he exact horrendous damage on the nicest character in the book, he implicates us the readers in the torture by telling it first person through the eyes of a character that we can't help but like.
A strong stomach is a definite before reading this. But if you have the intestinal fortitude, this is a classic horror novel. I'm glad I read it, and I will probably read it again at some point, but not for a long time.
This edition also contained two random short stories by Ketchum, which were good, but I was too shellshocked by the novel to really appreciate them. It also contains an interview with Ketchum and the makers of the film version of the book ... I didn't know there was a film and I have no idea how you could possibly film it. I really don't know if I want to see it.
This book is available from all good booksellers.
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