Books to Die For

Jack Ketchum's THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

When I first started working at Rue Morgue twelve years ago, magazine founder and president Rodrigo Gudino implored me to seek out Jack Ketchum's 1989 novel THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. I devoured it in a couple days and went on to write several pieces about it for the mag over the years, including a cover story on the 2007 film adaptation.

It's one of those novels that take fortitude to make it through, not because it is poorly written (it most certainly is not) but rather because it offers up such a bleak portrait of humanity. There's no denying it's difficult at times to bear witness to the pain inflicted on the young woman who is central to the story. THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is the kind of book that requires one to take a long, hot shower after reading, and even that may not be enough to scrub yourself clean. It goes without saying this is a novel that needs to be read.

A little more about the book from my feature on Jack Ketchum in RM#41:

"Ketchum's breakthrough novel, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, caused so many ripples after its publication that it ended up under the microscope of everyone from critics to academic digests such as Modern Studies in Horror. The book, in under 300 pages, managed to leave a much-deserved permanent scar on horror literature. This brutally powerful work masterfully combines the incumbant innocent of childhood with awakening puberty and a crime so shocking that it seemingly could only happen in fiction. Right? Wrong. And that's perhaps why, upon first reading, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR feels so tragically real - because many parts of it were.

Ketchum culled the story from a real news item about a young girl (Sylvia Marie Likens) who had been tortured, sexually fetishizes, mutilated and eventually beaten to death in an Indianapolis basement in 1965. He then transposed the grisly events into the landscape of his own, comparatively innocent, childhood memories of growing up in a neighbourhood not all dissimilar to the one in the book. In fact, he used his childhood home - sans underground torture bunker - and that of his neighbour's as the template for the two key households.

'I need to feel a story before I write it,' Ketchum explains. 'Maybe that's why I write so little comparatively speaking. I'm always working off real experiences and feelings as the basis of what I do, grafting them into and onto 'coincidence.''

Terror may, at times, be delivered with a Russian roulette-like randomness in Ketchum's fiction, but what's even more shocking than those spatters of blood-red senselessness is the face he ascribes to such brutality. As in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, antagonists in the Ketchum universe are often children or teenagers with a bizarre propensity for violence. They are people who make a decision to indulge in the morbid curiosities most people only feel for brief moments, then allow to pass.

"I prefer to write about the 'monster inside,'' Ketchum notes. 'That's because 'he's' in my face. The supernatural never did anything bad to me, ever.''

Unbelievably THE GIRL NEXT DOOR appears to be out-of-print, but a Kindle version remains available and used copies of the various paperbacks editions start around $18 on Amazon.com.