I hate it ( )

More than any for quite some time, this was a book I struggled to finish; but not because it’s boring or badly-written—it’s neither. I think the reason was that I knew from the start that what it describes is based on real events, that most of this really happened to someone; it’s appalling, but I couldn’t just look the other way and pretend it’s only fiction.
    We are in the small town of Farmdale, New Jersey, during a long hot summer holiday in the late 1950s, and living next door to the twelve-year-old narrator, David, is Ruth Chandler and her three children. There are also two other girls now living there, cousins whose parents were killed in a car crash. Ruth hates these two, particularly the older one, Megan, who is everything she no longer is—young, pretty, nice, full of life—and what begins as insults and petty humiliations gradually escalates into physical abuse.
    But it doesn’t stop there. Beneath the house Ruth’s husband, when he was still around that is, had built a nuclear shelter: a windowless concrete box, sealed by the heavy steel door from a meat-packing plant (this was the 1950s, a lot of people built them). Over the course of weeks in that basement, first under Ruth’s guidance and then passive acquiescence, the cruelties become outright tortures as her own children increasingly take over; then word gets around among the local teenagers and they start turning up to watch or join in. The victim, Megan, is fourteen years old, most of her tormentors about the same age or younger. It goes on all day, day after day, for weeks on end while summer passes.
    For me, what’s most appalling here is not that it is children who are doing most of these things, nor even the physical acts themselves, but the numbers doing it. If a single human being did all this to another, that would be terrible; but here you have four, eight, twelve of them at once with their cans of Coke or beer, all crowded around a single, naked, badly-injured girl: gagged, blindfolded, her hands bound and suspended by ropes from the ceiling beams. A dozen doing all this to one—it’s that.
    Although horror fiction, this is based on what really happened to sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens who was tortured and starved to death over months by Gertrude Baniszewski, her children and the neighbourhood teenagers—a case which shocked America. That was Indiana and 1965, but similar to this novel otherwise with the process escalating from taunts and minor cruelties to such tortures as immersing Sylvia in a bath of near-boiling water while repeatedly banging her head against the tub to bring her back round each time she fainted. There, too, the mother, and perhaps also her eldest daughter Paula, seem to have been at least partly driven by jealousy of Sylvia’s youth and prettiness. But the rest of them were driven by nothing—they simply enjoyed doing it, and remained mostly unrepentant afterwards.
    The Girl Next Door does differ in some ways from these real events. For one thing, here there’s a narrator, more ambivalent about what’s happening than the others and who only watches but never joins in. In the real world there was no one at all to help Sylvia Likens; a number of people in the neighbourhood suspected what might be going on, but not one of them said a word or did a thing. Also, I found the second half of the novel less convincing than the first, less realistic (due to the presence of that narrator I think). All the same it’s a ghastly, an unputdownable, read. In both fiction and real life these were not “monsters” who did this, but ordinary human beings. They were anybody, and that maybe is the real horror. ( )

This book was disturbing and unsettling. Very well written. Sad though. ( )

This book was so very hard to read, especially during the end. It was very well written, but the acts of the main characters were atrocious. Especially considering that the book was based on a true story. It brings into stark light the fact that things like this can and do happen. Daily. Great book, but I think it'll haunt me for a really long time. ( )

Pretty disturbing book. It's based on a true story of Sylvia Likens, which makes it even more heartbreaking. It's not something I would read again, but I still reflect on this book every few months and question how anyone could ever do something to such a girl without a definite reason (or any reason at all!!!) ( )