I Was Thinking of a Series of Dreams

 

It's Bound to Take Your Life

Nicely done, Zebra! Even if it does remind me of both Dead and Buried and Cold Moon over Babylon.

 

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons (1991): No Cure for the Summertime Blues

How much of a book do you have to read before you decide to quit? Most readers hate leaving a book unfinished, and I'm no exception. When I was younger I left all sorts of classics half read - have you ever tried to get through Nausea, The Magic Mountain, or all three volumes of The Rosy Crucifixion? - but I'm usually able to finish most horror novels. But Summer of Night, the sixth novel from Dan Simmons, joins that sad small shelf of the unfinished (and damn, I just remembered - I never finished Carrion Comfort when I tried to read it back in '90 or '91). Shame, because of course his debut novel Song of Kali is great, as are the two Hyperion novels, but otherwise I've not had much luck with the few other books of his I've tried. Really, I've got so many other horror paperbacks waiting to be read...

Summer of Night is obviously Simmons attempting to set up camp in some familiar horror territory. However the book simply doesn't have its own identity while laboring under the shadow of the largest horror of all, Stephen King's 1986 thousand-plus-page It. Sure, Simmons writes without all the junky pop-culture references that can clutter King's style, and actually I started to miss that as Simmons tries for universality and ends up with cliche, goes after profundity but gives us triteness. In fact I didn't find it all that, uh, Kingian: Summer of Night feels like it was plotted and written on autopilot. Although I am sure much of it is based on the author's own childhood, nothing feels real or lived. Everything could have been written by someone who was simply regurgitating It, maybe "The Body," maybe Dandelion Wine with a smidge of The Outsiders thrown in. Several hundred pages elapse before we get any kind of real palpable menace, madness, or evil, only threads of mildly interesting bits that dissolve into thin air.

Paperback edition Warner Books, Mar 1992

One major problem is that few of the children come truly alive as characters. The kids in this story aren't nearly as rag-tag as the Losers in It; one is a devout Catholic who loves assisting "Father C" - you know, the cool priest - with Mass, and another is well on his way to becoming an overly bookish intellectual. Other kids in their gang are weakly drawn, meek and mild kids whom you can't really keep straight because they're all such squares. Strictly dullsville. The other problem for me was Simmons's story is so normal and so middle-America I wasn't fearful for the characters or the town's safety; I was bored nearly to death by its banal, prosaic lifelessness. But on I trudged, on past repetitive chase scenes and descriptions of summer evenings and fields of corn and gravel roads. Kids on bikes bug the fuck outta me, why do I wanna read an entire 600-page novel about 'em?

There is also a cloying sentimentality throughout the book, but especially in the last few pages - I cheated - that made me cringe. After surviving the epic final battle, the kids then sit around and talk about what they're going to do when they're grown up. Ugh. These passages aren't profound; they're mawkish and lazy and I could almost hear sappy orchestral strings from emotional '90s Hollywood flicks rising in the background. Even scenes of horror - if you stick around long enough to get to 'em - have been done before:

Father C's smile continued to broaden, pulling back to show his back teeth, broadening further until it seemed the man's face would snap in half as if on a hinge. The impossible mouth opened wide and Mike saw more teeth - rows and rows of teeth, endless lines of white that seemed to recede down the thing's gullet...

There were lamprey-like creatures burrowing beneath cornfields, chasing folks, in some cinematic sequences, cool, okay, but these scenes weren't anything fresh, almost rehashes of Tremors. Scenes of characters investigating historical documents and ancient tomes to determine the true nature of their adversary is an aspect of horror fiction near and dear to my heart, but here it seems by-the-numbers. The bookish kid, Duane, tries to learn about the Borgia Bell, supposedly hidden inside the public school's bell tower, and which may have supernatural properties, the well from which the horror springs. This simply did nothing for me, sounding more like a droning history lecture in a stuffy classroom.

Today it seems readers, going by reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and various other blogs, love love lurve this Summer of Night. And I remember well back in the early '90s Simmons was riding pretty high, based on the originality of Kali and the imaginative prowess of Hyperion, as well as various very good short stories. But I can distinctly recall the disappointment I felt when Summer of Night came out; this seemed like a huge step backward for Simmons. Growing up in 1960, kids face a monstrous evil? I really thought he could do better than that. I never once thought about reading it till I bought a copy - in mint condition, which was my true impetus for picking it up - two or three weeks ago, hoping maybe it'd be one of those great summer reads you lose yourself in. I was wrong.

Psycho by Robert Bloch: Warner Books 1982 edition

Amazing stepback art - artist unknown, alas - from the September 1982 paperback reprint of Bloch's Psycho. Madness never looked so glorious!

The Totem by David Morrell (1979): Run from the Hills, Run for Your Lives

Chosen as an entry for Horror: 100 Best Books by none other than notorious gore-king Shaun Hutson, the nature thriller The Totem is the third novel from David Morrell, and his first in the horror genre. Morrell isn't a huge figure in modern horror fiction - although he wrote one of my favorite horror stories ever, "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" - but he created one of the '80s hugest and most recognizable pop-culture fictional figures, one John Rambo, the protagonist of his 1971 debut title, First Blood. Although I've never read that, I know you can dig this first edition paperback of it:

The Totem is another one of those books that was edited down greatly from its original manuscript form, then republished years later (in this case, 1995) with all edits restored. I read the 1985 Ballantine books paperback (seen below; at top is the first paperback, Fawcett Crest August 1980 with cover art by Richard Courtney, thanks to Secondhand Horror) so I don't know first hand what was "missing," and don't think the book needed much more than it had: it's a dour, no-nonsense, single-minded tale that grimly presents flawed and frightened men trying to forget past failures as they confront... well, somethings from the hilly wilds just above a small Wyoming town, something making mincemeat, and more, of innocent citizens. There is disease running through the veins of these somethings, a new kind of rabies - but it brings the same old kind of death.

Opening with a cinematic and suspenseful scene in a working-man's bar, The Totem wastes no time introducing us to Potter's Field, that small Wyoming town residing beneath a gorgeous mountain range. The usual cast of characters show up: the police chief, Slaughter, newish in town from back east; the old coroner, Markle, who'll be dispatched promptly; the younger medical examiner, Accum, who'll replace him, but who hides a hideous secret; Parsons, the wily, oily mayor/newspaper publisher; Dunlap, the alcoholic journalist returning to town after disgrace; and various other cops and love interest and town-folk and their children. Potter's Field comes complete with its own dark past: once in the early '70s a caravan of back-to-nature types, under the aegis of rich and eccentric Quiller, took to the unforgiving mountains to live in their own compound. But: They didn't know what every six-year-old around here knows instinctively. You try to take on nature. It'll kill you.

Morrell, in this version of the book, has made what might be a reduction of prose and character and motivation from his original manuscript that might take some getting used to; he has a habit of referring to people simply as "he" or "she" and even "it" when describing the monstrous and possibly inhuman creatures. His prose also has that weird mix of clarity and obscurity favored, I feel, by writers influenced by Hemingway. But none of this affects the power of scenes dealing with Dunlap's drinking, Slaughter's guilt about something that happened to him back in Detroit, or especially a terrifying and saddening scenario with a little boy beset by disease. The account of Accum's moment of weakness years before is deftly and quickly told, but leaves a real chill. Action scenes come thick and fast, but that's where Morrell's talents are (you can see that element highlighted in the '90s reprint below).

The Totem isn't truly original - time and again I was reminded of other books and movies (Rabid, Raw Meat, 'Salem's Lot, even Morrell's own First Blood). The climax is underwritten but believably chaotic and satisfyingly weird - evolutionary atavisms and ancient religious iconography figure in. It's a gripping read, mostly, even in this apparently "edited" version, and while I don't agree with Hutson that it is one of horror's 100 best novels, The Totem definitely deserves to be tracked down and read.

Rapture by Thomas Tessier (1987): Now You're In the Man from Mars

I'm sure upon seeing this lurid paperback cover (Warner, October 1989) for his sixth novel, author Thomas Tessier felt no bliss at all. Rapture features nothing even close to that tacky terrible art, fit more for some Psycho rip than for the even-tempered criminal psychological study it actually is. Now, scroll down a take a peek at the original hardcover from Atheneum Press: that's a scene right from the book! Amazing, right? I picked up Rapture solely because it was a Tessier novel; I'm not a huge fan of slasher stuff, so I hoped the cover was only minimally accurate. I never even glanced at the back cover's little synopsis, and I'm glad I didn't because I had no idea what to expect as I began reading, and was more than a little pleasantly surprised - we usually have some idea what a book is about when we pick it up, no? Tessier's prose and conviction kept me riveted to the page; it's terrific, a literate, precise, and chilling thriller. You should stop reading here if you'd like to be surprised as I was.

1987 hardcover

While Rapture isn't as decadent or perverse as his excellent Finishing Touches, neither is the novel as ambiguous as The Nightwalker; Rapture is a cool and collected expose of the sociopathic mind. Tessier spends much time detailing Jeff Lisker's growing obsession with an old high school friend (platonic, however), Georgianne Slaton. Both are now in their early thirties and live successful lives on opposite coasts: he owns an up-and-coming software business in LA; she's raising a family in their hometown of Millville, Connecticut. When Jeff's father dies he goes home for the funeral and tracks down Georgianne... but in a rather creepy manner: he follows her from her home and pretends to "accidentally" bump into her as she runs errands in town. Soon he's having dinner with her, her husband Sean, whose sarcasm, condescension, and impatience simmer barely below the surface (or is that just Jeff's insecurity?), and Bonnie, their brilliant teenage daughter just out of high school. Bonnie, who looks not unlike Georgianne 20-odd years ago. He decides he will simply take Georgianne from Sean. That's it. No matter how.

Georgianne would fall into his arms, and Bonnie would come with her. Sean was on the way out; he just didn't know it yet. And why not? Why the fuck not? "Take her," he said aloud. "I'll just take her!" And as he said this over and over again, he fell in love with the words, what they meant and the sheer beautiful sound of them. He seemed to be completing a sentence he'd begun to form during some previous incarnation.

2006 Leisure Books reprint

Tessier's great trick is that he slowly guides us into Jeff's mind, its rationalizations and inventions, its almost charming delusions, its grandiose planning and seeming lack of guile, that we don't quite realize just how fucking crazy he is, and when we do... his motivation still makes perfectly logical sense. It's why the book is so readable; it's all so easily believable, since the characters and situations feel so real. There is wit too, black wit, as when Jeff muses, while sitting in a coffeeshop, what its name means: Au Bon Pain. Why, it means "Oh Good Pain!" Heh. In a lesser-skilled writer, a couple twists in Rapture would seem forced; Tessier can make them seem like destiny. 

He had treated the whole thing like a problem at work... you let it simmer in the depths of your brain, and sooner or later the answer will come to the surface. It was, he reckoned, an essentially creative process.... He belonged to the select handful of individuals who had the courage, imagination, and sheer will to create their own destinies.

 1989 UK paperback

One step follows another, problems arise and are dispatched, all leading deeper and deeper into a conflagration of desire and death. "Desire" is key as well, as Tessier is one of the field's great erotic writers, understanding and presenting sex not as exploitation, but as human nature. Jeff's sex life, as well as his fantasies, are on full view in Rapture, and in this, we truly see his self-absorption. That then-current reference to Fatal Attraction in the cover blurb isn't so ridiculous. Jeff will not be ignored by Georgianne, nor by Bonnie; he will not be thwarted from his path, not even if something inside him knows just how doomed his plan is:

He was floating in darkness, high above the earth, and a voice was broadcasting a message to his brain: Stay there, don't come back.

Frigid Horror Fiction: The Cool Out

Anyone else in need of some chilling horror fiction with appropriate cover art to fend off the coming summertime blues? I've said before that freezing temperatures and blinding snow are settings for great horror. Two classic tales from the first half of the 20th century, At the Mountains of Madness and "Who Goes There?", help prove my point, while two classics of the vintage era, The Shining and Ghost Story, nearly secure it. But wait - there's more. Ahh, that's the stuff.

Evil is a Quiet Word by Theodus Carroll (1975): Don't You Ever Call On the Unspeakable

Couldn't find anything out about Evil is a Quiet Word, a Warner Books gothic horror novel by someone named Theodus Carroll. The stepback art is the same as the cover but the tagline is priceless: 

A

novel

that

murmurs

oh 

so

softly

of 

unspeakable

horror

If anyone's read this, let us know: is the horror truly unspea--

Ruby Jean Jensen: The Paperback Covers Redux

In the interest of completion, here are covers from Ruby Jean Jensen's 1970s Gothic novels, well before she got the Zebra treatment for her horror fiction. The Girl Who Didn't Die (Warner 1975) is my favorite: great painting, the woman's expression of fear perfectly captured, and in an odd twist, she's not actually running from the castle. Perhaps she will try to get help there to protect herself from whatever's chasing her across the misty moors, and then find a whole new world of horror waiting...

The House That Samael Built (Warner 1974) This Samael sounds like one pretty cool dude.

Hear the Children Cry (Leisure 1983) Meh. More like her Zebra paperbacks.

Seventh All Hallows' Eve (Warner 1974) Uh, what? Some kinda tribal or kabuki mask?

House at River's Bend (Dell 1975) Boring run-of-the-mill standard Gothic romance.

Child of Satan House (Manor 1978) Golf club? Cane? I expect her to break into a little soft-shoe at any moment.

Satan's Sister (Major 1978) That is one bizarrely specific tag line.

For more on Jensen, be sure to check out Phantom of Pulp's post.

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1971): Come On Up to the Devil's Whorehouse

Love this unlikely cover art for Hell House, the haunted house novel by the one and only Richard Matheson. Showcasing the classic Gothic romance elements that were then so popular in mass-market paperbacks, this 1972 Bantam paperback features a woman threatened and fearful of a house she cannot even see from the position she's standing in. Wonder how many old ladies picked this up thinking it was your standard Goth romance, but then ended up on a tour of real horror and perversion not even hinted at on the cover... Heh.

This edition from 1973 includes the two essential horror buzzwords of the era, "possession" and "occult" - and even by '73, two years after its original publication in hardcover, Hell House was considered a "classic novel." Oddly it doesn't mention either Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist! A horror fiction rarity indeed in those pre-King days.

Did you notice that all the women are in the exact same stance?! This Warner Books cover from '85 is a little too starkly blocky for my taste, and having King's and Straub's names above the author's must have stung Matheson a bit - but this had to really stand out on the paperback racks. And after actually reading Hell House I am not at all surprised to see their blurbs here.

The plot: four people enter the famously haunted Hell House and... well, not all of them leave. The original owner and occupant of the house, the legendary Emeric Belasco, got up to some pretty nasty stuff there, and it seems his negative vibes still permeate the place: no one ever saw him after a November night in 1929, when all his party guests ended up dead. Skeptic physicist/paranormal investigator Dr. Barrett brings his electronic ghost-detector called the Reversor, basically a framus that intersects with the ramistan approximately at the paternoster. Florence Tanner is a kind of Christian medium who can contact the spirit world. Ben Fischer was a child prodigy medium and a member of a previous and tragic endeavor into Hell House that left him the only survivor. Edith is Barrett's wife, prim, proper, unsure why she's along. Hired by the cranky old Rolf Deutsch, a rich eccentric man who wants them to determine if there is life after death, they plan to spend one week within its walls...

So, the good: early chapters include some tasty details about Belasco's predilections at home, which put him in a locus of Crowley, de Sade, and de Rais. Matheson strikes a somber and bleak tone throughout, hinting at times at a Gothic atmosphere - Hell House sits enshrouded in an eternal fog, its windows all bricked up, its rooms enormous and arrogant, the grounds a marshy, deadly tarn. Later, unfortunate characters pinball through this house of horrors, hit by wave after wave of fear and disbelief and pain in nightmarish collisions with their deepest repressions (revealing, I felt, where King and Straub got a lot of ideas for their own excesses). "It's me!" cries one character over and over again at the climax, maddening in idiocy, perhaps my favorite chilling moment in the whole book.

The bad: too much down-time and repetition in the week's activities and lots of bickering. Barrett's Reversor and his and the others' theories on psychic phenomena bore me silly and aren't scary at all. That "somber and bleak tone" becomes humorlessness; the book isn't really any fun in that "gotta keep turning the pages" way I like my vintage horror fiction. And the characters are virtually sympathy-free: Barrett's imperious, Florence a whiner, Fischer's generally out of sorts, and Edith's... well, her name's Edith, you can figure it out.

1999 cover art

The ugly: mostly the graphic sexual assaults, all originating in the rampant orgies of sex and death that were the norm during Belasco's reign in the house. One attack, on Florence, is lurid and somewhat ridiculous in its over-the-topness. Overall it's pretty baldly obvious that Matheson took The Haunting of Hill House and made it faster, cruder, meaner - but a lot shallower too, stuck in its '70s vibe of psychic/paranormal BS, which is my least favorite kind of horror fiction. The author bio states that Matheson is "a man who knows of what he writes, he is a long student of ESP and related psychic phenomena." Big whoop, honestly. Maybe in the stoned '70s that carried some cred, but not today. You might want to stop by Hell House for a visit, there's some really funky stuff going on there you'd like, but if you wanted to skip this tour and spend more quality time with, say, I Am Legend, I wouldn't blame you.

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (1989): How Do the Angels Get to Sleep?

Whew, where to begin? The Girl Next Door has, in the near quarter-century since its publication, achieved a notoriety few other modern horror novels can match. It was the third novel from Dallas Mayr, written under his now-famous pseudonym Jack Ketchum. Now, I hadn't even heard of Ketchum or this book until the last five or six years, I guess around the time it was reprinted by Leisure Books. None of his other vintage-era books, Off Season (1980), Cover (1987), or She Wakes (1989), look familiar to me, and he didn't start getting nominated for the Bram Stoker Award till the mid-'90s by which time I'd stopped reading modern horror, so it seems the book's reputation grew as a result of the reprints and the internet. Which isn't to say it isn't deserved, because it is. Oh is it.

The Girl Next Door is loosely based on the mind-curdling 1965 torture/murder case of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens. While some readers, if not most, may balk at the depths to which Ketchum goes in "recreating" what happened, he fills out his book with enough convincing details so that the matter never seems exploited or cheapened. Ketchum is, for better or worse, a reliable and insightful guide as he delves into these places of heartlessness and cruelty found not in the supernatural or the extraterrestrial but, well, literally, next door. He presents it all in plain strong prose that neither titillates nor overstates; he is in command of his words and images in a way a cheap and foolish writer - whose ranks in the horror genre are legion - could only ever dream.

It's told in first person by David, 30 years after the horrific events, which occurred when he was about 12 years old. His regret and sadness and confusion set everything in motion. Pondering his three failed marriages, he attempts to tell the story. The whole story, without faltering, of when teenage Meg Loughlin and her 11-year-old sister Susan come to live with David's next-door neighbors, the Chandlers, after the girls' parents are killed in a car crash. Ruth Chandler, a distant relation to the Loughlin girls, middle-aged, a heavy smoker and drinker but not without her looks, is well-known to all the kids living on the tree-lined, dead-end street as the parent who will give beers to them while they hang out with her own pre-teen sons Willie, Woofer, and Donny. Her husband left the family years earlier, running off with another woman (which explains some of her future behavior towards Meg).

David becomes smitten with Meg in a not-quite-romantic way; he's three years younger than her anyway, but spends some nice, memorable moments with her early in the story. Cute, sweet, well-done, a yearning without knowing quite what one is yearning for. Which makes the following descent the more upsetting. When the boys try from a tree outside her window to spy on Meg undressing and are denied it, David's response is bitter and black: I could have smashed something. I could have torn that house to bits. That surprised me; it could have come straight from one of James Ellroy's noir crime novels, for sure (more on Ellroy later).

Overlook Connection Press 2002

The most difficult thing about reading the book is that you know where it's going. When it happens - when Ruth's abuse of Meg begins - it happens fast but it also happens slow, if you know what I mean. The pall of inescapable doom threads through the early narrative, a malevolence hovering over every scene of innocence. It waits. It waits. It will not be denied. There is simply no other word for what happens: torture, physical and mental and sexual. First restricted from eating on her own, Meg then physically defies Ruth in front of David and other boys. Outraged beyond measure, and with the help of her sons, Ruth ties her up in the abandoned bomb shelter in the basement and the horror starts. This goes beyond the "horror" genre into what Douglas Winter talked about: that horror is not a genre, but an emotion. An emotion that's going to settle in and stay awhile.

There are things you know you'll die before telling, things you know you should have died before ever having seen. 

I watched and saw.

Since Ketchum structures the novel as a troubled adult looking back on a traumatic occurrence in his past, The Girl Next Door reminded me of Stephen King's novella "The Body" (found in Different Seasons from 1982, and the basis for Stand By Me. I guess I don't need to tell you that). Still utterly haunted by Ruth, adult David slips in at times and explains why this or why that, and especially how he was able to stand by while Ruth orchestrated such horror and why his friends went along. And it simply makes sense. Kids are powerless. Kids are supposed to endure humiliation. Adults control every avenue of kids' lives. I find this especially convincing in children growing up in the early 1960s, when adult authority was divine order. The divide between the world of children and the world of adults was vast and unbridgeable. Why didn't he try to tell? Meg actually does, once, to a cop who doesn't take her very seriously. This causes the boys to begin to feel a vague contempt for her. (Let's not forget Matt Dillon's immortal words in that teenage riot classic Over the Edge: "A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). Because, as David reminds us:

Shit, [adults] could just dump is in a river if they wanted to. We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.

The kids know better than to try to tell. Telling is bullshit. Telling makes things worse. Telling is an insult and a cheat. The kids even play what they call "the Game," a questionable past-time which, when Ruth learns of it, wants to play. And that makes it all even easier for the kids to go along... it's all a game, right? If Ruth says it's okay, well, it's okay for the kids no matter what is inflicted upon flesh ("You said that we could cut her, Mrs. Chandler"). This is when David admits he "flicked a slow mental switch [and] turned off on [Meg] entirely." Because How could she be so dumb as to think a cop was going to side with a kid against an adult, anyway? So I think Ketchum does a dead-on job of getting into a mindset that would become a willing witness to Hell, even drink a Coke and play crazy eights while doing so. It is totally believable.

2005 Leisure Books reprint

So other neighborhood kids get involved and it's all just normal, they're spending boring summer afternoons in the basement of the Chandlers', hey, didja hear, they got a girl down there and they... do stuff to her. When describing the sniggering remarks and dispensed humiliations and then the torturous cruelty in unflinching detail, Ketchum is carefully dispassionate, even when things turn, unsurprisingly, sexual for the young boys, as well as for Ruth and even a young neighborhood girl (at first Ruth restricts the boys from touching Meg after she's been stripped, not because molestation or rape is wrong but... because who knows what diseases this whore has. Did you just feel your throat close up? Good). He has David wonder if it all would have happened had Meg not been so pretty, had her body not been young and health and strong, but ugly, fat, flabby. Possibly not. The inevitable punishment of the outsider. But he reconsiders as he looks back on it:

But it seems to me more likely that it was precisely because she was beautiful and strong, and we were not, that Ruth and the rest of us had done this to her. To make a sort of judgment on that beauty, on what it meant and didn't mean to us.

Notice it says 'Terror,' not 'Horror'

It's this kind of insight that allows Girl Next Door to work so well when you might think it couldn't: This is true, this is how people who do these things think. Debase, degrade, deflower. Once the words I FUCK FUCK ME are burned onto her stomach - yes, you read that right - it's as if the boys lose interest; Meg has been reduced to a nothing. David tries to help her escape, and he fails. He tries to tell his father, then his mother, but cannot find the words to express something so... so. I mean, could you? Knowing you knew the whole time? David realizes he's the only one who has the imagination to conceive of the enormity of what's going on. I think that's what makes this book stand out from other "extreme" horror novels. The darkness may be complete, but it is true and real.

You may not be surprised to learn that I read The Girl Next Door in a one-sitting white-heat rush, utterly compelled and spellbound, my eyes burning and wet by the end. I could feel a thick sadness in my chest and shoulders. But it's not without its faults, and I can't really go into the major one because it's a spoiler, but I understand it. I do. I've seen it in other books and films too. Can't really blame Ketchum either, I suppose. But none of the faults are the result of the subject matter or the graphic detail; this is an "extreme" novel done right, with an understanding and an honesty I found utterly sincere.

Look at it again, in case you forgot how dumb it was

This is no tawdry paperback filled with high-school horror hijinks, as the clueless cover implies; there is no fun nor ridiculous cheese. In fact, that Warner Books cover art is one of the most insidious of paperback horror covers ever, an affront to both readers and the book itself (I don't blame artist Lisa Falkenstern; it's likely she had no idea what cover she was illustrating). Who the fuck okayed it? Someone who doesn't give a shit about books, that's for sure.

In some of the Amazon reviews I skimmed over after finishing I saw that many people hated the fact that Ketchum fictionalized the Likens case, but so what? What Ketchum does with the novel is quite similar to what Ellroy did with The Black Dahlia: take a real-life case of murderous savagery and fictionalize it, inventing characters so as to probe the psychology of those involved in a way unavailable to us normally, to attempt an understanding of the weakness, the fear, the rage, that could lead to such incomprehensible acts. In this respect Ketchum's book has more in common with crime fiction than it does with horror fiction. Which is absolutely fine with me. Horror fiction or crime novel or a hellish concoction of both, or perhaps something else entirely, The Girl Next Door gets my highest, but most reserved, recommendations.