The Girl Next Door

Gruesome meditation of the Sylvia Likens case through the thin veil of fiction which even Ketchum admits is a reaction to the feelings of rage and helplessness he felt. It's interesting to have the protagonists be a kid who may or may not have been one of the participants in the case, someone who could have been complicit in something everyone must have sensed in the neighborhood.

Strangely I can vividly remembering reading a chapter one this book when I was 12, which seems young for the content.

So much has been said about this book already, especially regarding its more extreme content and 'inspired by true events' subject matter, there's not really a hell of a lot I can add. While I don't want to rehash countless other reviews here, I'll admit that it isn't straightforward to avoid doing so.

To call 'The Girl Next Door' a gruelling read would be an understatement and, yes, that comes in part from a knowledge of the events that inspired it. I'll be honest here, even at a relatively short 250 or so pages, it took me a while to get through - mainly due to the fact that I put the book aside on several occasions, almost giving up each time. The graphic descriptions of brutality - of human brutality - are at times genuinely hard to stomach. However, if anyone were to find themselves in the same predicament, I would urge them to stick with it. Ketchum's prose is lean, taut, stripped of anything that needn't be there. Through the eyes of the story's young protagonist, the violence (and yes, make no mistake, it is violent) is observed without being leered at. Any hack can write gore and violence. To write honest-to-God pain takes real skill. And in The Girl Next Door, pain quite literally bleeds out of the pages. The pain of the victim, as well as that of the protagonist also, an adult scarred by the past, reflecting upon the horror of his youth and the pain of choosing between what is right and what he knows to be wrong. With simple, childlike reasoning, the decision is laid out: whether to follow the herd mentality or stand against what constitutes a very pure, very real evil.

By turns painful, heart-rending and even (believe it or not) uplifting with the lessons it imparts, The Girl Next Door is not an easy read, far from it.

But nothing truly rewarding is ever easy.

Quick review trying to leave out spoilers: I finished this book with a trip to the gym where I could work out some aggressions. Anger aggression that is. It'd be easy to confuse the types after reading this book. I felt dirty and angry. It doesn't make me love the book, but I think that's sort of the point. It's worth the time assuming you can control your urges after. Revenge urges that is. :)