Let's Go Play at the Adams

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Some have discarded the book purely because of subject matter, however, and I don’t think that’s fair. 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. I feel that it could clearly have been a much more affecting book if it hadn't fallen as it was, published shortly before the horror boom and with it the blossoming careers of such authors as Stephen King, and only two years before the author's untimely death.

Rather than going into the plot (I'd like for people to be able to read this with as few spoilers as possible. It begins with the what-if premise of Barbara being saved at the last minute, and the kids' activities exposed as a result, and explores the resulting media frenzy and criminal trials, as well as Barbara's physical and emotional recovery from her ordeal.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. I’m not sure if it was the expectations of holding this paperback in my hands or what it was, but I found the book to be thoroughly engrossing. But just as people regard Ketchum's book better, why is "The Exorcist" the book from the 70s that people really remember as being one of the most disturbing novels ever when "Let's Go Play" is so groundbreaking in violence? This book will make you emotional for so many different reasons throughout and I found I went back and forth between disgusted and crushed time and time again, sometimes within the same paragraph.

Let’s Go Play At the Adams’’ has become sought after and is often featured on wish lists of books people most desire to own. But what people forget is that Ketchum's famous work of extreme horror was preceded by another novel based on that same case. The author appeared to be saying: actually, it's pretty easy for the right social pressures to turn normal kids into psychopaths. In 2020, Valancourt Books republished it in paperback format under its Paperbacks from Hell series, featuring its original mass-market paperback artwork, and including a new introduction by Grady Hendrix.

Another reader praised the book for its realistic portrayal of helplessness, and showing how one's thoughts would actually wander and what they'd wander to, what one would think and feel, when they're tied up and perpetually helpless. The spine was immaculate and other than a weird darkening (which was probably caused by water contact) and some pressure indents, the book was in great condition. The children, apart from their horrifying actions, are made to look as much as they can like people. Giving the Freedom Five their own interior lives and thoughts, normalizing them but not humanizing them, ups the horror because we can’t point to these children as some kind of monstrous aberration. In that case, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens was imprisoned, tortured, abused and eventually succumbed to her treatment over a period of three months.

The book was hard to put down while simultaneously hard to carry on with and the ending left me reeling. There hasn’t been anything specific to link the case directly with the story, other than the same use of one of the children, and the similarity of a young female being imprisoned before being killed.I should start by saying, this book turned out to be nothing like I thought it would be, but that hasn’t let me down.