by Richard Garn
To every story there is a hook, an opening line meant to introduce the readers to the story and compel them onward. “My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, however, begins with a challenge:
“You think you know about pain?”
In the first chapter we are introduced to David Moran, 41, our narrator throughout, twice divorced from women who both thought they’d known pain. One had once been viciously attacked by a housecat (“She doesn’t know shit, that woman.”), and the other had been a victim of a car accident that left her bones broken, and as she struggled out of the wreck she caught a glimpse of her then-boyfriend dead and torn to pieces. That woman, grown-up David admits, had it closer.
David then takes us back to his childhood, to the idyllic wonderland of fifties suburbia, and introduces us to Meg Loughlin, a girl who has just moved in next door. She’s a little older than David. He describes her as the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. They meet briefly for the first time by a creek in the nearby woods, and again at a carnival that had rolled into town. There, they ride the Ferris wheel together. Before they do, though, David has to ask her, which of course comes out all wrong, and it is here that we first experience Ketchum’s expert use of prose to achieve a sense of realism. Meg is staring up at the Ferris wheel, and David asks her, “Want to try?” In the following paragraph David is horrified by the eagerness in his voice, and even more horrifying to him is the probability that Meg heard it as well. Two choppy paragraphs of David’s internal monologue about what to do next follow, and then he backtracks. “I mean, I’d go on it with you if you want,” he says. Ah, to be young again.
The first sixty or so pages of The Girl Next Door functions on this level, introducing us to the neighborhood and its denizens: the kids, the parents, the peculiar but likeable woman next door who has taken in Meg and her younger sister. We are also introduced to the younger kid whose capacity for violence toward animals is stunning only in retrospect, and the older idiot who wasn’t content unless doing something illegal and/or espeically stupid. Remember them? So do I, and they conspire to lend to the setting of The Girl Next Door one of the most vivid and realistic landscapes in recent memory.
What follows is one of the most brutal, relentless, and visceral reading experiences you’re ever likely to have as Meg faces the growing madness of her caregiver, Ruth, a single mom much admired by the neighborhood kids for her inclination to treat them less like little children and more like friends, equals, often allowing them to have beer and hang out at her house, watch TV, play cards. Which leaves David, and we along with him, to experience this all from a most peculiar angle, that of a not-so-innocent bystander.
I’ve been a horror fan for most of my life and I’ve never read a book that terrified me the way this one did. Ketchum throws us into the idealized land of our youth and ramps up the insanity so gradually that when the book reaches its hellish fever pitch we are still there, wandering the old neighborhood, down in the woods, or in the neighbor’s basement. There were times when—sometimes mid-paragraph, sometimes mid sentence—I had to set the book to the side and remind myself that this was not real, that none of this actually happened.
It was not until I decided to dig deeper into the novel’s background that I had that crutch kicked out from beneath me. Ketchum regularly draws from true crime in his novels and this one is based loosely on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl who was tortured to death over a three month period in the autumn of 1965 by her own caregiver and several neighborhood kids in an Indianapolis suburb.
Some have written The Girl Next Door off because of this, and understandably I suppose. After all, how can Ketchum steal a genuine American tragedy, one that has also spawned a true crime novel and a film, An American Crime, staring Catherine Keener and Juno’s Ellen Page as Sylvia? Even The Girl Next Door inspired a straight-to-DVD adaptation, marred by an overly rapid pace and a cast of young actors whose sometimes maladroit acting and screen presence is trumped by the simple fact that their faces in no way resemble the faded visages that showed up in my mind as I read. The sadistic depravity that took place in a suburban Indiana basement has become big business. But anyone who writes the novel off for this reason is missing its most striking element.
Horror fans know about the archetypal ‘cocky bastard’ character and what frequently becomes of him in the movie’s third act: he lasts long enough for us to hate him only to yield the film’s most gruesome demise. Think of the arrow shoved through Kevin Bacon’s neck in the original Friday the 13th. There is a perverse joy in watching some characters die. Ketchum’s novel calls this into question. Not once do we find joy in Meg’s ordeal. It has become vogue in mainstream fiction to celebrate the gruesome, with violence being treated like a backdrop almost forgotten or at least taken for granted. Ketchum’s novel doesn’t shy away so easily; it forces us to face the violence. More importantly we are forced to face that ugly part of ourselves that embraces or ignores violence, evil, and depravity. It doesn’t just point out society’s ills, shrug, and walk off the way some fiction does. The Girl Next Door questions and challenges even as it most darkly regales. It beckons and touches with one hand; slashes and claws with the other.
The reader’s relationship with David speaks to this. As the horror before him escalates, he experiences, at first, only ambivalence. Extreme ambivalence. On one hand he, like us, finds the events disturbing. On the other, the events aren’t wrong at all. Ruth, a woman who has always been kind to him, and his friends with whom he shares a camaraderie that anyone who grew up in a neighborhood like this one remembers fondly, are the sources of the madness. Plus—and this might be the most disturbing element of all, especially once Ketchum has trapped the reader in a web of realism and, more ominously, nostalgia—on some level David finds pleasure in what he sees. As Meg is tortured and humiliated he can’t look away. There’s something fun about this, he reckons, and powerful. As he puts it after witnessing one incident: “Shame looked square in the face of desire and looked away again.” By the time he decides that what’s going on next door is wrong and that he has to do something to stop it, and the reader stops cursing David and joins him, the novel attacks with unimaginable fury, all localized in a very real world in the reader’s mind. The Girl Next Door is not just scary, it’s painful. It’s dark beyond any horror story I have ever read. And in its darkness it is awe-inspiring.
Perhaps the most tragic thing about this is that the literary mainstream is in danger of missing this one. It came out to some acclaim back in 1989 but more or less went away until the film adaptation was released in 2007. It’s labeled horror, but ‘horror’ is only a marketing term meant to sell merchandise to a specific demographic. In their eagerness to target an audience the publishers alienate a much broader readership. There was a time when Henry Miller’s work was deemed pornographic and William Faulkner was an ignored pulp novelist. Jack Ketchum is a cross between the two and will one day be mentioned in their pantheon. (Scoff now, but read the book before you disagree. And you would also be wise to read Ketchum’s The Lost. Although not as frightening as The Girl Next Door, the character of Ray Pye—who is based on the same real life maniac who inspired Arnold Friend in Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?—rivals Hannibal Lecter as literature’s greatest psychotic villain.) But my opinion should in no way impede or enhance your experience with the novel. And that is the most appropriate term: experience.
Experience The Girl Next Door at your peril, but please do experience it.
