Let's Go Play at the Adams

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Hearing Barbara’s thoughts as she’s continually put in helpless situations makes you wish she could break out, and forces you to care about her as she slowly loses her mind. That they’re playing the game for real and not just pretending to hurt people only makes it more exciting, and it’s this weird lack of malice that makes it all the more awful that they’re doing these things. Some have likened this to an adolescent version of Wes Craven's shocking Last House on the Left and I guess there are similarities - the challenging of authority, the misguided following of peer pressure, the myopic view of the world, the ruin of innocence. And so we are left with incredibly long chapters of pure cruelty and torture of a helpless woman with nothing to induce empathy or horror in the witnessing reader. Absolutely not for anyone, but if you are not faint-hearted, and wanna read an assured to cult status horror book about "evil kids" and their victim, give it a try.

Through the course of the story each role is clearly expressed and there are no doubts that these people act based on their own choices and what, to them, is rational thought and reason. He quotes several contemporary reviews and ponders why there remains a fascination with the book, even though the author only published the one and has been long dead. Then while they are torturing her, she dies, and Johnson explains how they all grow bored with her body, now that she’s not responding nor making noises. At the time this book was released mental health wasn’t paramount and many people went undiagnosed with different issues. Whether this was to capitalize on the notoriety of the book or to try and make a decent effort to follow the children post murder, Johnson himself had done a decent enough job of philosophizing what was to come for the group.I cruised through this paperback, my first physical read in about two years, which is now my 80 th book read this year (at the time of writing this).

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Its plot focuses on a group of rural Maryland children who drug, incapacitate, and eventually torture the college student babysitter hired by their parents while they are away in Europe for two weeks. Make no mistake, this book isn't for the reader who prefers lighter reading material, and while in it's most basic classification it seems to be a horror novel, the reality is that it's more of a psychological treatise on children and their interaction with the world. But because the characters' motivations seemed so unrealistic to me, so did their actions, and I found myself quite detached from the whole story. It was very hard to see Barbara's optimisim begin to degrade when she realizes that it has become more than a game and she's not going to get out of the situation alive.

I 1st read this book when on a family holiday, I was 14 and felt that I could instantly relate to many of the characters, although as the book progressed I did find myself becoming more and more abhorred by their behaviours - not because of what they did but because I could see in some of my social circle much of the conflicted desires and attempts at control. The waiting for what's going to come next, the waiting to see how far the kids will take it, the waiting to see how long Barbara has to endure being tied up, waiting to see how they'll next take away some more of her dignity. An interesting note I’ll add here instead of further on, in the Further Reading section – from the link I’ll provide, it appears as though Mr Johnson detested children (though he himself had two daughters from his first marriage) which adds further intrigue to the basis of this story using children as the main characters.Forgetting this, then, is the mistake made by Barbara, a college girl hired to care for the young Adams children in their home along a river in rural New England. Good/Good condition, over all wear to book and dustjacket, upper corners bumped, bookplate on inside front cover, top edge of dustjacket crinkled, tears to front fold of dustjacket at top and bottom ends. I’m not sure if it was the expectations of holding this paperback in my hands or what it was, but I found the book to be thoroughly engrossing. There seems to be no redeeming human quality in them, no chance that one could have a spark of realization of what they are doing to a fellow human being and save their victim. Steve is the author of the novel Invisible, the novellas Wagon Buddy, Yuri and Jane: the 816 Chronicles and two collections of short stories; Frostbitten: 12 Hymns of Misery and Left Hand Path: 13 More Tales of Black Magick, the dark poetry collection Dim the Sun and his most recent release was the coming-of-age, urban legend tale The Girl Who Hid in the Trees.

So, while I spend probably another decade considering whether I dare read this again, it will sit on my bookshelf where I know it can behave itself. Barbara’s sanity was pushed to – and beyond – its limit as the book reached its conclusion, and I did feel her mental state rapidly diminishing as she became aware of the ultimate plan for her. Instead of feeling utterly violated and used, as her virginity is savagely taken, no less; all she cares about is that she might be pregnant. Barbara is intelligent, but between her decision to continue trying to appeal to the humanity of her captors (whom she thinks of as “just children”) and her reluctance to hurt children even when they’re torturing her, she ends up in worse and worse positions. Perhaps tame isn’t entirely true, as some things in this book will be shocking until the end of humanity as we know it.It stands as a strange and utterly true testament to the uniquely separate mind children have from adults and the dark nature we so quickly forget when we grow out of it. But there is a reason it does not ever appear on anyone's list of most disturbing books ever read, or best horror novels ever read, while you hear about Ketchum's version of this story discussed all over the place.