The Girl Next Door

Jack Ketchum

Stephen King, in On Writing, said some good words about Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. Immediately, the book became impossible to find in its original printing, with collectors snapping up every extant copy, and new ones coming on the market fetching prices that make no sense for a mass market paperback. Overlook Connection put out a new edition of the book, but really, twenty-six bucks for a two hundred eighty-three page trade paperback? And this they call their "affordable" line? Someone at Overlook Connection needs to grab a dictionary and look up the definition of "affordable," because their definition in no way reflects reality.

That said, if any eighties horror novel of comparable thickness is worth the insane prices it fetches either on the collectors' market or in its new edition, The Girl Next Door is it. I've read a whole lot of eighties horror novels over the years, which probably isn't surprising considering I was a teen through most of the eighties and have always been a horror novel aficionado. And I can safely say that not a single one of them affected me as did The Girl Next Door.

Not that, fifteen years after its original publication, there's much that's out-and-out shocking about The Girl Next Door's content. In the age of such stars ascendant as Robert Devereaux, Charlee Jacob, and Monica O'Rourke, tales of the extremes of human degradation are starting to look positively old-school. However, even the brilliant work of all three of those authors, who are some of the best in the business today, lacks some sort of component present in The Girl Next Door. I honestly don't know what that component is. Perhaps it's the complete lack of motive for the events in The Girl Next Door; while Jacob's characters suffer far more extreme fates on a regular basis, the shadows of war, drugs, and other spectres are always in the background, on which the reader can conveniently pin some blame for the forces therein. An escape hatch for the reader's emotional state, as it were. Ketchum gives us a reason for one character to behave as that character does in the novel-- a descent into dementia that accelerates as time goes on. (And, really, it's something of a lame reason, which is entirely the point.) But what causes all the rest of them to go nuts? No one knows. And that, folks, is the essence of horror.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For those of you who have not yet found the time and money to track down a copy of this gem, a quick synopsis. Davy is your typical 1950s kid-- the world is bucolic, in that odd, nostalgia-tinged way that you know from talking to anyone you know who was alive during the decade, but Davy is an observant enough kid to know that not everything is copacetic (the shadow of the cold war hanging over the country, for example, and the McCarthy trials, for which his parents are glued to the TV, he tells us early on). Davy's life takes a turn when, just as he's hitting puberty, Meg and her sister Susan move in next door. Meg is your basic twelve-year-old's-ideal-girlfriend-- older, beautiful, and naïve about the ways of the area into which she's moved after the death of her parents in a car accident. Moreover, she's literally the girl next door-- the girls are staying with their aunt Ruth, Davy's next-door neighbor and mother to Davy's best friend Donny.

The problem is that Ruth is going insane. Slowly. (We get an idea that Davy's parents are, or were, aware of this previously; there's a mention of something that occurred between Ruth and Davy's parents some years before the narrative. We are never told what it is.) Her kids are already somewhat cracked, especially young Ralphie, called Woofer by his friends. Eventually, this particular madness affects, to some extent, every child in town, even Davy. All except Meg and her sister Susan. And they, of course, are the objects upon which the madness unleashes itself.

Coupled with the reasonlessness of the events that unfold in the book, which is a powerful thing in and of itself in a horror novel, is a profound sense of connection with the characters. It struck me while reading that Ketchum's decision to use Davy as the narrator, rather than Donny, or even Meg or Ruth, was primarily responsible for this in some way I couldn't quite discern. Perhaps it's Davy's puppy love combined with his odd, detached sense of horror at everything that unfolds, or maybe it's just that Davy isn't quite so affected by everything around him, and therefore keeps a less emotional eye to the proceedings than one might expect from a different point of view. Or perhaps it's the contradiction inherent in those last two sentences, which does not come off as in any way implausible in the book. Whatever the reason, the reader is drawn to a profound sympathy with Meg and Susan, and to a lesser extent Davy, that makes the book resonate that much more.

At its core, though, the effectiveness of The Girl Next Door is enhanced by orders of magnitude when the reader is informed (not in the book; one must do a little digging to find this out) that, like the eighties' other classic of violence, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, The Girl Next Door is, in fact, based on a real occurrence. While Ketchum went back a bit in time (no doubt to draw the contrast of the fifties and the murder), there can be no doubt that The Girl Next Door is closely based on the case of Sylvia Marie Likens (whose story can be found at crimelibrary, but will contain major spoilers for the book, if read beforehand). And that, of course, makes it far more horrible than it already was.

The Girl Next Door really is the amazing piece of work Stephen King claims it is. Ketchum gets under the reader's skin in ways that few horror novels have ever been able to achieve, and the result is a stunning success. I suggest trying to hunt down a copy of the original paperback printing (on Warner Books) rather than trying to get ahold of the "affordable line" Overlook Connection trade paperback-- but however you get hold of it, do so. I was originally going to mark the book down a star because of the presentation by Overlook, but Ketchum's original source material's quality simply overwhelms the machinations of a publisher. This is a book worthwhile at any price.