The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum makes things "okay".
As tragic and traumatic as it was, it was mild in a way. Maybe it comes off mild due to the lack of descriptive prose or only a few “horrible” things happening for being such a "horrifying" book, possibly the perspective falls flat at times. Maybe it's mild due to all the hype that it gets and the expectations I had going in, or the fact that I'm desensitized. I've seen many people describe it as mild, and I've seen some people be even disappointed by it due to the expectations they had or what they consider the potential it could have had.
This is the point. This is one of the reasons it's so genius and will always be one of the best extreme horror novels.
To desensitized readers or to the extreme horror community, it might look standard or run of the mill. It follows an expected premise and has all your horror things in it. Most people say that the biggest reason it's so disturbing is because it's about children, and it's based on a true story, but that's not all.
I usually don't care for stories that are based on true stories because they tend to be exploitative, or they tend to extremify horrible things that aren't “bad enough” for the point of entertainment which overrides and downplays things that we should be seeing as horrible. But The Girl Next Door is something different, this is a good form of exploitation. It says a lot about people and common life and psychology, and warns us about humanity without putting it directly in our faces. Jack did an amazing job at making things mild, common, "okay".
The basics: it does a really good job of desensitizing the audience to things that happen over time and shows the characters constantly normalizing things that are happening. Davy only noted things that were objectively wrong or understandably wrong, such as assault or severe injuries. He only thought to act when he felt that things were getting out of hand, and despite the power that he had, he was not acting with the urgency or intensity that we like to picture ourselves having in events like this. This is how most people would react to a crime or any horror happening in their home, especially children. This constant looming sense that it's "okay" and everyone and everything is okay.
It's not Okay in a comforting way, simply in a very common way, which is far worse. The audience will subliminately comfort themselves due to aspects of storytelling and prose and perspective. Everything and everyone is contained.
These events can happen to anyone, they are happening and we don't know better. The victims don't know either. And we can't do anything about these things happening without extremely rigorous education and awareness.
One of the focuses of the story is how children are victims of their environment and are very vulnerable. This was supposed to reflect on Meg, but Davy and other characters were just as vulnerable to the torture and normalization of horrible things being done to Meg as Meg was to being tortured. What Ruth was doing and what Meg was going through was completely normal, no one questioned it. There was no human instinct or psychological toll that made any of the children hit some kind of realization or hit some kind of limit. Also, you would expect children to be compassionate or have some kind of limit, because of how often children are associated with spiritual world and love and compassion, but in reality these children are blank slates and they only absorb Ruth's evil. They have curiosity and sexual desire and flaws, they are given permission and a safe space to explore at Meg's expense.
In a way, a lot of this is framed as a typical summer. It wasn't the worst summer of his life, it wasn't a crime, it was just one of his childhood summers. It makes you wonder what else has happened in his life or what else Donny and the others have done to not even question the social norm or the rules that they would witness other children following, and just give in to what they're allowed to do or told to do.
The horror is within as well. A lot of people miss the fact that we are the monsters and Jack Ketchum proves it. The fact that readers finish it thinking it was pretty mild, or go through it waiting for it to become extremely shocking and disturbing, is proof that a lot of people are disturbed. If it was us in this situation, what would we allowed to happen or what would we be desensitized to?
There's a pressure on Davy and the officer to do something the entire time, and there's also pressure on Davy from the very beginning to feel more empathetic and remorseful rather than just telling an entertaining memory. Yet at the same time we are the ones reading and being part of the exploitation of what happened. We are the ones expecting him to tell this story and tell us all the horrible things he's done.
Davy also rationalizes it in a way where he explains that children are vulnerable and that this treatment towards Meg might have been a product of her environment or her fate. We opened ourselves up to that and we actually got very little compared to most extreme horror, such as very basic descriptions and only few methods of torture, and if that's not enough for people as readers (even fiction readers), we are rationalizing what happened. Yes, it could be much worse, but it shouldn't be much worse and it should've have to be. The fact that people only read this because this is based on a true crime or because of disturbing horror recommendations is devastating for many reasons. People only care because they want to be scared. People wouldn't have the same level of care or publicity if it was actually happening to their neighbors or family members – it gains more publicity than real cases and we go in with extremely high expectations only to come out with this “childhood summer” story. Plus the fact that people went in looking to be disturbed but came out with this cold, harsh truth and this “okay” representation and were either disappointed with it or still said it was scary just because it was based on a true crime is so depraved.
While reading I found myself accepting Meg accept her fate, mostly factually, and it took me time to realize what I was accepting. We usually expect characters to fight back until the very end or otherwise show signs of defeat or react in a way that a human would react to such acts, but she just accepts her fate. It's very difficult to describe the lack of defeat that she had, she originally wasn't conventionally defeated when she was ignored by the officer and through the torture, she wasn't conventionally drained the way that readers might expect over time. She was portrayed as "okay", and the only reason we had to think that she wasn't okay was the information given to us, in order to visualize the event or just know what was going on. She sort of didn't know what was happening to her, despite being completely aware of how her body felt and watching what they did to her. It's as if she didn't know how bad it was, or at least that's how Davy portrayed it which is a whole separate problem. It was very face value. She simply knew that she was being hurt and she knew that she was being treated unfairly and eventually tortured, but she didn't have the understanding that we do. Or if you want to make it worse, consider that it's from Davy's perspective where he completely missed what she was feeling, that her feelings didn't even exist to him. And since he accepted it, she automatically accepted it outside of the things that were factually wrong, such as assault or physical injuries within his understanding.
She didn't die from weakness, she died because it was simply the course of events. It was supposed to be extremely tragic or otherwise cathartic, the end of her suffering, but instead it was presented as a step of the process. That's the return for these kinds of cases, that's what we're left with. It's similar to “If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?” If no one cared about Meg, did she actually escape, did she actually see relief and see the end of her suffering? Did it actually exist if the official process was to come down, make arrests and retrieve the remains? Davy sees that as a step in the process as well and simply moves on with his life, and again shows no true remorse or even questioning when the only reason that he recalls or revisits any of this is because he has a story to tell us.
This is what's left after true crime cases and trauma for many people. This is the harsh truth.
by TUD-13BarryAllen