Let's Go Play at the Adams

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It isn’t that he wants to be a man, exactly. It’s that he has no choice. Dianne speaks of life as if every little aspect of it were a game — and if she’s right, then growing up is losing. But being a child is losing, too. I gave this book 5 stars in a similar way to how I gave The Girl Next Door 5 stars. I didn't enjoy either. I can say right now, that I will never read either again. They are not favourites of mine and I didn't love them. They are tough to read and definitely not for everybody but they earned 5 stars each for making me feel so strongly and for just how well they were written and portrayed. That's not to say the books are alike. I've seen comparisons and while I can understand some similarities and I understand that they were both based off the same real life case, there are some major differences. First of all, TGND is closer to the real story. TGND also had the children being lead and corrupted by an adult figure. In this book, however, the children are acting completely on their own accord. TGND started slowly and eased into the tension and then gradually unveiled the horror. This book jumps straight in. Seriously. There's a small prologue and then bam! Barbara is tied to the bed (that's not a spoiler, it's in the book description and it is the basic premise). However, once set up it is a tense ride. There isn't non-stop, graphic, torture, in fact, most of the actual torture is very few and far between. The real torture is the waiting. Just as it is for Barbara. The waiting for what's going to come next, the waiting to see how far the kids will take it, the waiting to see how long Barbara has to endure being tied up, waiting to see how they'll next take away some more of her dignity. It's tense and intense. It's genuinely terrifying. The 5 children are genuinely terrifying. They have no empathy. Feel no guilt (except Bobby but it's impossible to feel sorry for him when he started it all). They take pleasure in it. All of it. The plot: Bobby and Cindy’s parents go on holiday for a week, leaving a pretty babysitter named Barbara in charge. Along with their friends John, Dianne and Paul, the kids call themselves Freedom Five. They’ve been playing games together for years. The day after the parents leave, Freedom Five ‘capture’ Barbara and a new game begins.

Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: The book most certainly doesn't justify it, but played with the second time Barbara is raped by Johnny; as the text states, "it is possible to be made to enjoy." Take Barbara's unwanted physical response, lingering hope of an escape, awareness that this will be her last time, and throw them all together, and you get an encounter that even she doesn't fully know how to feel about. Ripped from the Headlines: Maybe. Some speculate that it was very loosely inspired by the Sylvia Likens case (which was a tragedy of its own, also involving kids being very cruel to a teen girl, but was of a very different nature than this book). Others say there are more differences than similarities. It’ll be interesting to see. From the article I shared about some of Johnson’s life, it doesn’t sound like he was that liked of a family man and I can’t speculate on if his family wants to be involved with it at all. The Baniszewskis lied to the police about what had happened, forcing Sylvia’s sister Jenny to lie as well. But Jenny whispered quietly to the officers, “You get me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything.” Smart girl. My point is that the innocence of children is coupled with a rage that makes them horrific, like little adults trapped in small cute elfen bodies not yet fully capable of the full destructive power of their older brethren. When that rage goes unsupervised, or if that fire is even stoked by the frustrations of a drunken, miserable, irresponsible, and mentally ill adult, as in "The Girl Next Door," then we get a portrait of innocence destroyed which is as tragic as it is horrific. Everyone is a victim here. Ketchum's work is truly heart-rending and compelling reading.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. It offers a very real look at the minds of both the children and Barbara in her deteriorating state over the course of the book and how easily things can slip from perfectly normal to being horrific over the course of a single week.

While the book is a good one (and I understand exactly why people HATED this book in the 70’s) I wish the author gave some insight into what happened to these children in the aftermath. He sort of sums things up but it’s so vague that he could have left the epilogue out. I was really disappointed there. Dirt, the only god she knows. Daylight, trees and leaves, cicada-song. The smell of wet earth and rotting corn husks after a rain. Dying as Yourself - Paul in Game's End. Right before he dies, the cloud of insanity is finally lifted from his mindDepressingly, this is Truth in Television. People always tend to mentally degenerate in groups like that - take the Bystander Syndrome for example. If one kid saw a dying person in front of him, he would try to help him because he feels 100% responsible. If it was ten kids, each of them would feel only 10% responsible. PDF / EPUB File Name: Lets_Go_Play_at_the_Adams_-_Mendal_W_Johnson.pdf, Lets_Go_Play_at_the_Adams_-_Mendal_W_Johnson.epub Les Yay - The epilogue suggests that Barbara's roommate may have had a crush on her...or maybe not. It's a little vague. Barbara, a twenty-year-old college student, fun and friendly, and only mildly disciplining, isn’t an especially plausible kidnapping target. Why would children, even supremely fiendish ones, sideline a cheerful housekeeper and playmate? Their initial goal, remember, is only to achieve extra freedom. Johnson tries to justify it by making it a daring extension of their outdoor army games, yet it remains a stretch. The workload to keep her imprisoned is heavy; the extra freedom is light. Not to mention that they all understand that parental punishment likely awaits. Granted, Barbara’s sheer likeability is in one way a useful choice; it makes their escalating disregard for her even creepier. Still, a bummer babysitter, slightly older, less fun and more restrictive, would have enhanced the story’s believability as well as ratcheted up its kids-versus-adults dynamic.

I actually struggled with what to rate this. For me – no doubt this is an outstanding psychological thriller/horror novel. Sure it had some clunky parts and some odd writing tidbits, but this book will stay with me for a long time. I’m a person who doesn’t get triggered or find much to be too hard to watch or read, but the enduring horror of what this book describes will be on my mind for a long while.Humiliation Conga: John; this culminates in him being raped in prison and later committing suicide. Lastly is Cindy, the youngest of the group at 9 years old. Cindy doesn’t feature in the novel an awful lot, but when she does she’s simply a bored young girl who doesn’t fully understand the reality of what’s happening. Even at the end, when things are getting more and more violent, Cindy doesn’t care. She’s just going along with the rest of her friends. He has big, wet eyes; a fragile body; a head that twitches and jerks around like a bird’s. He has hair like downy feathers, wild and curly and thin and brown as the forest floor. The five kids that make up Freedom Five all go through various, thorough changes. It might be cringe-worthy to some, blasphemous to others, but I got the impression that this was a stab at writing a coming-of-age, psychological-horror tale. While it is based around a political/societal narrative of ‘ what if good people do horrible things,’ I can’t separate the overall plotline as being anything else than coming-of-age. It’s just told from the point of view for a large portion of the book from the murderer’s side.

In the past (or so she’s read) adults killed and tortured children without a second thought. There was a young king of England who went that way — she can’t recall his name or even what century he was from, but she doesn’t care. Those things don’t matter to her. What matters are the winners and losers, the taste of blood, the inevitable, righteous feeling of your own hands holding a pillow over someone else’s face. If you are easily offended, I don't think you should read this but for everyone else who likes their horrors realistic, foul and unpleasant but intriguing and thrilling, this book is highly recommended. Thank you.

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Let's Go Play at the Adams ' is a 1974 horror novel by Mendal W. Johnson and originally published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Its plot focuses on a group of suburban Maryland children who drug, incapacitate, and eventually torture the overnight babysitter hired by their parents. [2] Publication [ edit ] Redemption Equals Death: In Game's End, a now-teenaged Bobby dies saving a girl who he thought was drowning. She wasn't really drowning, she thought he was cute and was just trying to get his attention. Say what you will about Bobby, but this does redeem him somewhat. 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. Not in a sexual way, but by having to make solid grown-up decisions. She also transforms from idle participant to a dictator in charge of what will be happening.