The things about The Girl Next Door that people don’t bring up. (No spoilers)

Okay, implied spoilers but they'll be as minimal as possible in case you want to reread or you're trying to decide whether to read this.

The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum is disturbing and grotesque for obvious reasons. But I have never heard anyone bring up character development. As well as vibes behind everything.

There's so much more I could say about the writing style and the time management of this book but I'll keep it on topic:

No one changed in this book, which is the thing that gets me. You can say that they became more evil over time but that's not exactly true, because even though it doesn't explicitly state anything in the beginning, you know from the minute the characters come up, they are vile and things are not right. Having done worse things towards Meg as time went on was not exactly a result of loss of restraint, it wasn't out of temper or due to a degradation of everyone's mental health. Everything that happened to Meg was simply the next step, all the materials were there and it was only a matter of time, it was just a natural progression like seasons changing, and it was framed as a punishment or prevention with Meg's behavior or another factor being an excuse.

Davy as an adult still sort of goes with that explanation and never goes into all the ways he could have spoken up, when you can expect any adult to very vehemently defend a little girl. I can personally tell that Ruth did not believe in anything she said about Meg or did to Meg and I actually think that she wasn't delusional or a prude at all, she was simply playing a version of The Game. After growing up herself during an extremely difficult time period and being married and raising children, nothing ever developed her. I like how we're never really given a reason for her acting this way or making it okay to do these things and outside of the migraine, she seemed a perfectly functional and normal at least for the time period and she was the mom everyone went to, so this could be anyone's mother or anyone's wife. Nothing changed her even to the end, and she didn't even take pleasure in what she'd created or benefit from it in any way, the suffering and things that ensued were for nothing

Also I'm surprised that the book didn't go into the "boys will be boys" territory, which I know Ruth could have pulled off. It almost went there a few times and I like how it just danced on the line of that and let the characters beat themselves instead of using that as a cop out. It flips the script on Meg as the girl and the boys had no reason to question it. Even Davy didn't get so far into questioning it and when things turned around, he wasn't extremely elaborate in making a plan the way most fiction characters are (I think it was only a few pages of him actually responding to what was going on) and I think there's a lot of realism in that. It took quite a lot for Davy to think that he actually had to do something and then when it failed and with the way everything ended, he was "fine" in a numbed, realistic way. The bystander effect and repression hits so hard that I think even these events didn't really change him as a person, at all.

He watched all of this happen and yet throughout the book, he can casually mention just living his life or doing things while everything was going on at that house, he can even skip over time periods where nothing really happened in his life despite things going on in that house. And unless I'm forgetting something, there's really no remorse or pity behind any of that, he can just make statements about his life or little anecdotes about music or home life without expressing the extreme curiosity or worry that someone would have (or imagine themselves having) in this situation, even in retrospect as an adult. He was never truly betrayed by his friends or affected by anything, and it's not just limited to the fact he didn't know better or couldn't really communicate something like this to his parents. And to think that he was actually the symbol of a common person or the middle ground and often even the best one in the house. I got this weird feeling while reading, like whenever something absolutely horrible or violating was being done to her, there was this unspoken subliminal vibe that he was the best person in the world and he was the good guy for not taking his turn.

I could imagine him being 20 or even 15 at the time of writing all this instead of being a grown adult with life experience, looking back at this, and the maturity level and priority is exactly the same. It's all face value. That's how little he's changed in general and from this.

And it sounds like he was, until recently, even more functional than I am. Everyone here is more functional than me or even the average person. He floats. Just like everyone else in the universe, floating and having things go on. He didn't mention his mom changing in any way after all of this at least in a significant way. He didn't mention any significant laws that would change how children were treated or these kinds of situations got handled (at least from my memory, correct me if I'm wrong), so they don't matter enough to be mentioned or really don't exist.

And this is just an autobiography at most points. Just whatever goes, with something bad that happened over a long period of time being a focus. Yet it's also one of the most realistic autobiographies I've ever read because pretty much nothing happens in his life, which is what most people experience, just one thing after another, and at some point it keeps up this idea that the things that happened to Meg are just part of the cycle and kind of don't matter. I might be looking too far into it but a lot of times I got this very small vibe in the back of my head that a lot of the bad things happening to Meg were more about him, and when Davy holds back on details or is very vague, I have this little headcanon that he was seeing her as a possible future girlfriend and the things that were happening to her or her body were ruining his possible future girlfriend. I feel like if he would have talked a little bit more about his own feelings it would reveal that he planned rescuing her for the wrong reason, such as wanting to be her savior or wanting to be with her, because why else after everything that happened to her and what exactly would it have been that made him think that everyone has gone too far? He's clearly not using this to process his feelings about his friends or things that happened to her or things that he witnessed, outside of a couple of general points of being stuck as a child and being vulnerable, and it gets too redundant / off topic in a way that's completely pointless, so it can't be for testimony or witness purposes.

This could easily be a paper about his first exposure to love or his summer crush, simply taken too far, and he doesn't know how far it went simply because life was life and the girl next door was the girl next door and Ruth was Ruth. The way it opened up make it sound like a high school paper or maybe a college essay or maybe a letter, that's how half of our stories or papers started out at school to meet certain criteria, with this big hook and a bunch of improvised middle and a conclusion mustered together just to wrap it up. I entertain the idea that he's dealing with a very early crisis with everything not going well as an adult and he's either trying to profit off of this or went back to school and this is what he submits. It's insane.

Meg literally just existed. She didn't change his life, she didn't do anything major to change the story or drive anything to happen. She was doing exactly what he was, simply living life or rather, there was no purpose for her to exist whether in the world itself or in his perspective and she had no life outside of what was going on. It was just brief mentions of her being forced to do chores or something or otherwise very very short scene where she tried to talk to an officer or help herself, and I mean an extremely short scene or just a few lines each time, mostly something to drive him into his tangent about the thing that sucks about childhood. Even as an adult in retrospect, knowing everything he should know now, he had no comment or feeling about anything going on with her. She mattered for a hot minute in the beginning when I thought she would be the love of his life or she was about to make some huge impact on him, and then real life kicked in. She was simply The Girl Next Door and nothing more because why would she be? And this is how her legacy goes down, as per my headcanon, in a book or an essay that was good enough to be exploited.