Review of The Girl Next Door

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make. (www.goodreads.com)

This novel had been lying on my shelf for a long time. If you've read some of my other reviews you know that since I have a daughter I'm especially vulnerable for cruelty towards children, more than I used to have since I can't stop thinking how I'd feel if it was being done to my little one.
I've bought this book before I was pregnant, I think about 4 or 5 years ago, and hadn't read it yet. Then after my princess I ignored it, knowing it would be too horrific.
Why did I choose to read it now? Maybe it's because my girl is going through her 'terrible two's' stage? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just a little bit tougher again, you have to be with the girl I'm raising.

I'm glad and sad I read it though. Glad because this is a story so horrific most would turn away and ignore it, but since it has been taken from real life you need to know it, so it won't happen again. People need to see instead of being blind.
I'm sad I read it, because it's something you can't unknow. This contradicts with what I said just a few sentences ago, but my stomach barely could handle what happened in this book. It makes me afraid what would happen if I couldn't care for my daughter and she was left in the care of someone as cruel. Luckily I have a great family I can rely on, but not everyone does.

Despite the subject it's a very well-written novel. I've read more of Jack Ketchum before, Off-Season being one of those novels, and I didn't like it that much. A little too farfetched maybe. The Girl Next Door is horrible due to it's closeness. He depicts a very true scene of life in the late fifties and how children and adults lived in two separate worlds. Transferring the story to a third person seeing the abuse, but not entering into it, makes you as reader a passive viewer of the horror going on. You'll hate it, and at times you'll be glad you haven't seen it all.

I'm rating this 7 out of 10. 

Review of Joyride

Hoping to escape from her abusive ex-husband, a woman and her lover successfully carry out their plot to murder him, only to find themselves at the mercy of an obsessive, twisted stranger who witnessed the crime. (www.goodreads.com)

I've been to Paris for 2 days. To get there I took the train which gave me plenty of time to read up especially since me and my husband decided to leave our almost 2year old with her grandparents so we could get a little time to ourselves since she's the wonder of my world, but a tiring wonder at that. 
On the train to and from Paris I decided to read Joyride by Jack Ketchum. I've read Off Season by him and The Girl next door is standing on my bookshelf. 

Joyride is a disturbing tale about a couple who's being taken hostage by a lunatic who has seen them in the act of murdering someone. Thinking that they are like him, he approaches the couple and takes them on a murder spree across the country. 
You get an inside on the couple, Lee and Carole, how they are trying to get away from an abusing ex-husband when the legal system lets them down and how they are terrorized by a lunatic who happens to have seen them when they were at their worst. 
But you also get an inside scoop on Wayne, the looney whose main dream has been murdering someone, taking retaliation on those doing him wrong. All his life he's been terrorized by his father and then consequently by his emotionally lacking mother. When he's finally living alone he starts writing everything down what's offensive to him. I varies from a barking dog to a surname he particularly finds distasteful. 
When he finally kills someone he doesn't want to stop. He's cold in his calculations and ends up killing a whole lot of people. 

What I also liked in this novel, is that with every person he kills, you get a short view into what brought them to that place in that time. Kind of a remembrance of the victim, making them more real instead of them being cannon fodder to help the story line along. 

Joyride isn't faultless but it's a very interesting read. Although, through the more hardcore parts of the novel I always thought that it was just a novel. I writer's words can't hurt you or anyone else. Then I read the afterword and I realised that his main character has been made out of 2 very real men who have done what's described in the novel. That is enough to raise the hairs on your arms and look at this novel in a whole other way. 

In the back of the novel there was a 40 page short story by the same author. You'd think it would be about some killer species of plants reading the title, but no way in hell.
I started to read this last night, a few pages before I went to bed and those pages kept me up a while. So much that I almost turned on the light again because I wanted to know what would happen, if she would be okay.
It's a story about a couple that does the most atrocious things to young females before killing them. Even involving their own family. My stomach turned while I read this little story and I'm very difficult to shock.
Jack Ketchum is a writer you should avoid when you're not used to read about the most vilest of us all, because such people do exist and he's not affraid to put them in the spotlight.

My personal score: 4 stars