Here's another long lingering gaze upon our inhuman humanity for everyone who is still labouring under the delusion that there might be a tiny shred, maybe just a single thread, something, anything, of common decency to be found in the vast majority of ordinary people. Jack Ketchum's here to tell you - sorry. There's not. 
 This novel is based on a real crime which took place in 1965. JK relocates it to 1958 and, creepily, as if this tale needs more creep, which it doesn't, to his home town - to his home street. To the house next door, in fact! 
 I'll give you the gist of the whole thing so you can see that this is another book you don't need to read, which since they've made a movie of it, is also a film you don't need to see. The time I'm saving you all! 
 The story is based closely on the Sylvia Likens case, which I hadn't heard of, and now I have, and I wish I hadn't. So anyone with any desire to maintain their delusions of common decency and humanity should look away now. Sylvia was 16. Her parents were carnies, always moving, always parking the kids with relatives. In this case they parked her and her sister with an acquaintance, no more than that, called Gertrude Baniszewski who lived in Indianapolis and had a whole bunch of her own kids and was dirt poor, an asthmatic, a depressive, and as it turned out, deranged. Sylvia very quickly became the concentrated scapegoat hate-figure for this sadistic woman. But more than that, Gertrude encouraged her own sons and their punk friends to join in with the torment. It took them a few months to torture Sylvia to death. They were reasonably creative. No one in the merry group of torturers told anyone in authority, neighbours didn't notice a thing. When Sylvia died one of Gertrude's daughters finally freaked out and dropped a dime otherwise I guess we would never know. The whole family was rounded up and Gertrude was given life. She got out in 1985 and died in 1990. 
 JK introduces an explanation of Gertrude's psychology (in his novel she's called Ruth Chandler) which is that she was a pathological hater of young women because they tormented her with their innocence and prettiness to such a pitch that she had to hand out lessons in how the world really is, what sort of suffering women have to endure, how they're all really sluts, and so forth. So something must have occurred in her own life to drive her to this pitch of malignity, clearly. It's clear to me that the right people never go to therapy : 
 Patient No 1 : I keep having flashbacks to when my mother used to give me cheese sandwiches for my school lunch when she knew I hated cheese. 
 Therapist : Okay, that's it, get out of my office. 
 Patient No 2 : I have all these fantasies about chopping guy's heads off. 
 Therapist : Do you think that's because your mother gave you cheese sandwiches when you were a kid? 
 Patient No 2 : That's right doc - I didn't remember that until just now - this is a real breakthrough. 
 Therapist : We're doing great work, Jeff. I'll see you next week - and remember - no more dismembering young gay men! 
 Patient No 2 : (grinning somewhat shamefacedly) Aw, okayyyy... 
 Er - back to the book. So this story is a horrible one, but it has so many resonances, (leaving aside the mythical older-woman-seeks-to-destroy-younger - this cruelty rings and chimes and vibrates down through the centuries past the Countess Bathory all the way to Snow White and Cinderella and beyond). But take Stanley Milgram's famous electric shock experiment, which was inspired by the Eichmann trial, and sought to investigate how regular ordinary people would inflict terrible pain and suffering on other humans because someone in authority told them to - simple as that. A guy tells you to turn up the dial to 500 volts and zap the wrongdoer, and you know this will seriously injure him, but hey, the guy asking you to do this is wearing a white coat, and you're in a laboratory, so sure, turn the dial and hear the guy scream! We can connect that with Christopher Browning's brilliant investigation of who actually shot all those Jews in all those Polish forests - his book is called "Ordinary Men" - of course, because that's who it was. And on a more Girl Next Door level, I remember the movie River's Edge (1986) in which some 16 year old guy kills a 14 year old girl and brags about it to all his friends and takes them to see the body. After a few days one of them called the cops. That was based on a real case too. Oh, of course, there's "Whatever Mother Says" which is very similar to the Girl Next Door and which I reviewed already. There's a pattern I'm seeing here. 
 You're never going to prevent deranged individuals doing cruel things. But what troubles our sleep and poisons our dreams is that it's so easy, it seems, for them to get us, average us, friendly us, to join in.