Read this book review - for in the very near future, a new film will be the talk of the horror community.  Andrew van den Houten of Headspace (review) is producing the adaptation of this sickening novel for the big screen.  Any of you masochistic gluttons for punishment out there, haplessly searching for the next bit of material that will disgust and repulse you on a personal level so no-holds-barred that you'll never forget it - I emplore you to embark upon this nauseating rape of innocence called "The Girl Next Door" - written by Jack Ketchum.

Dear Meg...  If I could have just entered your fictional world - weaved my way into this novel between the words somewhere, through an unseen void - I would have saved you.  You were angelic - delicate and strong - losing your parents in that accident, surviving that crash with your little sister - the anguish you'd already been through.  What I would have done to that bitch Ruth...  What kind of luck is it to have been handed over to such a cruel, insane beast of a woman.  And those kids - each one of their necks I would have snapped.  The things they all did to you - the things I was forced to read - all the brutal rape and torture you had to endure.  Im sorry, Meg.  Im sorry I couldn't stop them.

I tend to get up in the middle of the night a lot - anxiety, old age, who the hell knows.  Those darkest hours between 3am and 5am when time becomes a petry dish upon which to cultivate the purest imaginations of sinful anguish and dread.  They are my favorite hours to read - and not many books, even the most extreme, ever stake a claim to unnerving me in the night.  With "The Girl Next Door" - you're not fearing something lurking in the shadow outside your door, or locking yourself secure into your bedroom with the shades drawn.  With this, you look at it and say, "I'm not so sure I want to return to this place.  I don't want to know what they're doing to this poor little girl."

This novel is simple and takes place on a dead end street in your average neighborhood.  Young Meg and Susan, teen and preteen respectively, have lost their parents in a horrific car accident, and have survived with several gruesome scars to show.  Dave, a young boy on the street, tells this story first narrative, of the beautiful redheadded Meg that moves in next door who flints the first sparks of love he's ever felt.  But she and her sister have moved in with the Chandler's - single mom Ruth, and her sons Willie, Donny, and "Woofer".

Ruth is one sick bitch, and has some very twisted, psychotic points of view on women and discipline.  This story takes place in or around the 1950's, a time much different from today, believe me - when children were seen and not heard, when physical discipline was legal, and when how you dealt with your children behind closed doors was your own business.  "The Girl Next Door" takes this day and age and adds the premise - what if these two young girls were sent to a foster home, where the caretaker, Ruth in this case, is mentally sick and into abuse and torture.  What starts off subtly uncomfortable and scorning ends up in the basement of the Chandler home, in the darkness of a dank and dark bomb shelter, where nobody can hear you scream.

Once Meg falls victim to Ruth and her sons, she is tied up with thin clothesline and hung from the ceiling beams.  For about three grueling months, the narrator of the story sits by idly and watches with curiousity and nauseating impotence the decimation of this young beautiful girl.  The only thing more infuriating and stomach twisting than the beatings, bruises, cuttings, burnings and rapes, is the young boy Davy who tells this whole story.  For weeks - he has the power to stop all of it - to reaffirm Meg's story to the police - to get just one person down in that cellar to see whats going on - but drawn in like the rest of the kids in the town who get in on the act, who come by daily with new ways to torture Meg and make her cry, he comes back to the house mesmerized by the spectacle of it all - and the first tickles in his gut from seeing her strung up in the dark, naked and mercilessly exposed for anyone who wants to come by and take part.

At this time the movie is being shot.  Im not sure how this one will transfer to film - it should be interesting to see this one evolve.  The material this story relies on is very taboo in the movie industry - merciless child abuse, young nudity, rape of children, orphan torture - the reality of these things shoved into your face is what made this novel undenably horrifying.  On film, however, how can one truly portray such issues in full light?  To shy away from these things would dullen The Girl Next Door's weaponry, but to expose it, a filmmaker will have a hard time attaining an R rating.  This is the "catch 22" of The Girl Next Door, the movie.  Ill be getting with the film's executive producer Andrew van den Houten very soon, to shed some light on these questions and look at the razor's edge this film is riding on - between x-rated horror and the potential failure to adapt this story properly.

FINAL ANALYSIS:  What a brutal read.  If you read here and there - you can sit there and pick at Jack Ketchum a little - say he's not the most colorful writer you've ever read - say that the story isnt anything spellbinding - even try to point out that its sort of an exploitation piece, really, on mentally disturbed families, child abuse, and the undenyable guilt of looking the other way.  You wouldn't be denied your points.  All the same, the story is written, and when you open this novel by Jack Ketchum, you inadvertantly open a world and bring it to life, and halfway through just wish you hadn't.  This is what horror literature should pull off.  The next time I walk down the horror isle in the bookstore and see this title, I will look upon it with a newfound respect and admiration for that one definite accomplishment.  Best seven bucks Ive spent on the horror genre in a while.

CLICK HERE to purchase Jack Ketchum's "The Girl Next Door", and check back here for our interview with the film's producer Andrew van den Houten, coming soon.