From now on I decided I'd spare a praise or two on a first good chapter of every novel I read. I have thought about it a lot but I never seemed to get around to doing it. Laziness, mostly. Writing a review can be an exhausting business; every reader in the world would know that. I'm up for it now, though. I believe it's a shameful injustice to overlook first chapters, especially good ones. Those first few words fashioned and polished to capture a reader's attention and hold tight to it, they deserve some bravos. Of course nobody could shove Dickens off his throne. He has borne the trophy for years and will bear it for as long as people read his works. 
 The Girl Next Door, although far from lyrical like A Tale of Two Cities, promises a lot with its first chapter:- 
 It's a cut of the first chapter (no need to include the whole text here; if it intrigued you, I suggest you go read the book) but I believe it's enough to grab you and give you a faint sense of what is to come: pain--in the most excruciating, atrocious manner. And sure enough, true to his word, Ketchum gave me what he had promised and delivered it with a remarkable storytelling. 
 Ketchum's prose is what you'd describe as no-nonsense. It takes on a conversational tone yet it manages to sound sober, never drifting toward fanciness for one bit. Absolutely American, which I admire. It's a difficult job to do. I fully understand that as a writer myself (well, a budding one, but hey). The only improvement I would recommend is a less masturbation of prepositional adverbs. Ketchum should, as a paraphrase of White and Strunk's rule--"omit needless words," let go some of 'em fillers. It's a pain in the eye to read three consecutive adverbs in a sentence: He walked back out into the sunlight. Even without the first adverb, the reader would likely know the character walked toward a location he was previously in. Two side-by-side adverbs is acceptable, forgivable even. But three? I don't think so. It's a verbosity that does no good to a writer than make himself/herself sound like a dunce. I hope Ketchum refines this in his later works. 
 The Girl Next Door has a simple plot development. Naked, really. It employs no embellishments (e.g., cliffhangers, deus ex machina, and useless, beat-around-the-bush scenes) yet the terror is agonizing and alive. The pain, as promised, hurt a lot. What is worse is that it's inspired by true events. The crime actually transpired. A girl was tortured to death by her aunt and cousins for real. Reading some of the gruesome scenes, I felt like bawling out for the poor girl. The novel poses this question throughout: Why could people be so cruel like that? It's something to hate a child, but it's another thing altogether to beat that child to death, especially when the beating in the first place has no reasonable bounds. 
 Ketchum did a great job at sketching his characters. Ruth is frightening, all right. So are the kids, who remind me of Stephen King's Children of the Corn and Stefan Kiesbye's Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone. They have texture so tangible it's scary. It almost feels like they're breathing on you, their breaths warm but sending chills up your spine anyway. Believable also. Sure, kids can be wild and rebellious every now and then, but they look up to adults most of the time. We studied children in developmental psychology. Our professor once told us that a child would run to a playground full of kids, suddenly stop, look back to his/her primary caregiver (mother, father, nanny, etc.) and ask for permission. Most of the time this is true for all children. And Ketchum did it right with his characters in this novel, with Willie, Donny and Woofer obeying their mother's commands and doing so in a grateful manner. 
 I enjoyed this novel so much I read it one sitting. Definitely worthy of five stars!