Let's Go Play at the Adams

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The children, apart from their horrifying actions, are made to look as much as they can like people. The premise sounded fun and, as someone who has a high tolerance for bad subject matter, I wasn't worried about the content warnings.

Her involvement in the kidnapping went no further than “just because” – she was in charge of all the children simply because she was the oldest and she let them do whatever they wanted.The only times I found Barbara a bit frustrating was when she kept blaming herself for everything but then maybe that's a natural reaction.

Shocking and sickening, yet tender and nakedly human, you will never forget reading this one, I promise. If you are reading this review on Goodreads you’ll have already seen my star rating, but before I divulge it here, I wanted to go through a few things about my rating. When asked why they can’t just stop, they still give childish justifications like “we’re playing a game and you lost,” or “we just can’t, that’s all, we all voted.So we have a cult status horror novel that's so despicable people either tore it to pieces or felt like vomiting upon finishing it. Through the events that take place in the book, we see how little it takes for a small group to divert their thoughts and feelings from the expected path toward a separate more savage one. And sure, his older sister, who does become the director of this whole event, could conceivably be seriously messed up too - maybe something really nasty is going on in that household. Barbara's confinement and torture are a slow burn, and we learn a lot about each of the characters as the children become bolder.

Some have likened this to an adolescent version of Wes Craven's shocking Last House on the Left and I guess there are similarities - the challenging of authority, the misguided following of peer pressure, the myopic view of the world, the ruin of innocence.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Dianne – initially described as being tall and boring to look at (when reading this I had to remind myself that a man in his mid-forties writing this book, would still believe a woman would be longing for a girlish figure and to have the boy’s attention, especially in the 1970’s) she blossoms into a young woman by the end. Obviously, as the torture progressed and got worse, my opinion of her did change, as she changed too.

In that brutal and matter-of-fact tone, there’s a further horror in just how the captor and captive think of each other.Most kids take this as part of interaction with adults, but some could clearly take it as enough of an offense to take action in the right circumstances, if not to declare a sort of war with that adult. Barbara has, and I’d think that someone in her position would be a bit more savage and desperate than she was. I both highly recommend it and also don't because it's a truly excellent piece of horror fiction which has been severely overlooked but it is also not something that I think most people will be able to stomach. Author Appeal: Some people speculate that Johnson was a sadist and the book is nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence. Make no mistake, this book isn't for the reader who prefers lighter reading material, and while in it's most basic classification it seems to be a horror novel, the reality is that it's more of a psychological treatise on children and their interaction with the world.