Let's Go Play at the Adams

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You’ve probably heard of this book and its cult status before, but if not, this review will have a few spoilers in it; spoilers I actually read in other reviews.

Again, I have now way of appreciating how utterly barbaric this is, but I’ve seen the news, watched documentaries, read books; surely she would have been more affected, especially being the kind of person she is. The author appeared to be saying: actually, it's pretty easy for the right social pressures to turn normal kids into psychopaths. We need horrible, hard-to-watch films like Blackfish or Blood Diamond, and we need stories like this one to show us what it’s like to be a victim of someone else’s games. all while still bound and gagged, but relents at the last second because she can't bear to hurt Dianne any more than she already is.This one does the opposite: Johnson seems, at times, almost squeamish about the blood and guts of the story. Barbara's confinement and torture are a slow burn, and we learn a lot about each of the characters as the children become bolder. I had so many different thoughts running through my head with this novel, that I actually had to start myself a little review notebook where I could put all my thoughts on paper. There’s nothing elaborate or ungrounded about any of it, and it’s one of the many details that reminds the reader these are, more or less, ordinary children. He quotes several contemporary reviews and ponders why there remains a fascination with the book, even though the author only published the one and has been long dead.

there is no believable context to why they do the things they do, unless it is mere coincidence that brings these 5 deeply disturbed individuals together. Out of print '70s cult novel is a fictionalized version of the horrifying Sylvia Likens torture/murder.I was struck time and time again by Johnson’s philosophical musings told through the mind, eyes or mouth of a child character. The simple rules we follow as children can seem innocent and wondering to us as adults but we rarely see how that way of thought can be changed and manipulated into being something far darker and very, very, calculating.

In Barbara’s internal monologue, laid out in page after page of agonizing detail, she vanishes further inside her own head as her situation turns helpless, at one point resorting to the idea that if she can wound her captors, if she can mark them in some way, then that would be enough, since escape is almost impossible.

A sexually frustrated teenager is definitely easy to imagine and while only a teeny tiny amount go on to commit sex crimes, it’s totally plausible. And so we are left with incredibly long chapters of pure cruelty and torture of a helpless woman with nothing to induce empathy or horror in the witnessing reader.