Let's Go Play at the Adams'

Let's Go Play at the Adams' is better than I expected but not in the same category as its more gruesome counterpart, The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum, both being surprisingly well written.

LGPATA is formal, meandering and even quite boring in places.

Even though LGPATA is based on real-life circumstances, The Girl Next Door tells it much closer to what actually happened, as well as being more visceral and hard-hitting in comparison to LGPATA's alternative scenario that dawdles, muses and goes back on itself as seemingly unsure at what it wants to say and even if it dares.

The Girl Next Door makes you feel complicit in committing the crime while unwittingly taking part in it, compelled to watch events whether you like it or not, including the evil mother who eggs on her children and the other kids to behave as abysmally as her depraved personality permits, plus the physical, continuous and descriptive <spoiler>torture and rape</spoiler> that has no right to be in print, which LGPATA only touches on at times.

In LGPATA you seldom get to feel how Barbara, the victim, actually feels, who's mostly just a sack of tied up potatoes from a reader perspective.

At the this point I rated LGPATA only three stars, but ended up changing my mind because there's something profound and almost beautiful in addressing the importance and pricelessness of life.

It proffers some profound questions on the meaning of existence and whether or not there's a God? After you die the whole world stops, not to others, but from your perspective as everything ends, meaning, logically, that there must be a God, an afterlife, or something, otherwise the universe no longer exists, it's a form of existentialism that surprised me about this book, which doesn't really feel like a work of horror but a story about the mishaps and bad behaviour of a bunch of kids.

It's not often you see things from the perspective of the victim, Barbara, though, which is a shame.

Strangely, I also felt sorry for the kids, the aggressors, for having their innocence forever yanked away in place of an undeserved future of trauma and confusion.

Fortunately, LGPATA did not wimp out in the way I feared it would, which is a big extreme horror literature plus!

Not so fortunately, there's an afterword/epilogue, which is never a good idea when a decent ending will do that tames down the conclusion instead of finishing with a punch, and boy oh boy, does Mendal W. Johnson go on and on at times instead of hitting hard! Rock hammer hard!

Some people may be turned off by the subject material, while others may quit before the end, but don't - there's something intrinsically shocking about this book, especially the needless and self-justified behaviour of kids who do nasty things because it's fun and because why not? Lord of The Flies springs to mind. However, Jack Ketchum got it right in his version, as the kids were egged on by an evil adult!

But this is a surprising read nonetheless, especially the ending and how it ramped up. The book seems lame at various points, but ultimately isn't.