Let's Go Play at the Adams

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the ending of the book quite honestly did make me wince a little and feel sorry for the victim in their game! There isn't non-stop, graphic, torture, in fact, most of the actual torture is very few and far between. 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. As Barbara falls deeper and deeper into her own madness at her situation she begins to think about only having days and then hours left to be alive. Hearing Barbara’s thoughts as she’s continually put in helpless situations makes you wish she could break out, and forces you to care about her as she slowly loses her mind.

I highly recommend this book to those who can read the book and truly grasp the message of the tale. In that case, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens was imprisoned, tortured, abused and eventually succumbed to her treatment over a period of three months. She’s accepted the fact that she’s a prisoner but the ending comes when she knows there’s no escape and that the children will go through with their plan and kill her. The sheer helplessness and hopelessness to be at the mercy of captors who you cannot reason with, who have no empathy, no guilt, no human mercy that you can hang your hat on.Redemption Equals Death: In the epilogue, a now-teenaged Bobby dies saving a girl who he thought was drowning. 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. So toward the end, when we dread the obvious outcome, and Bobby actually seems to waver and consider stopping such a monstrous game, the reader grasps desperately at a shred of hope. The treatment of Barbara was, of course, pretty nasty, and the descriptions really took me into the bowels of the story. Johnson stretches out the story with page after page of the kids having meetings and pow-wows and planning sessions, and arguments, and making peanut butter sandwiches, and.

Barbara is hired to watch the two Adams children, Bobby and Cindy, while their parents go on a trip to Europe. But it seems that after they frame a random dude who’s loitering in the grounds of the massive house of the murder, everyone just accepts this and asks no questions. It refuses to give its readers comfort or a safety net, instead forcing them through its twisted human interactions.

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.

The second thing Barbara did was to try and use her ‘active participation’ as a way to get John’s defences down and attempt one more time to get him to let her go. She’s been deprived of basic human needs – they’ve limited her food intake to weaken her, only allow her to use the washroom twice a day and she isn’t being bathed or cleaned. That they’re playing the game for real and not just pretending to hurt people only makes it more exciting, and it’s this weird lack of malice that makes it all the more awful that they’re doing these things. Each kid has their own horrid agenda and reasoning behind what they do and we are stuck in their heads for the majority of the time only leaving them to get sucked into Barbara's nightmarish vision as we are made to go through everything she goes through no matter how gruesome, humiliating and sickening. Each time they take their game a little further, they get a new rush which quickly becomes usurped by more ennui, so they keep pushing the boundaries.

There seems to be no redeeming human quality in them, no chance that one could have a spark of realization of what they are doing to a fellow human being and save their victim. But the McVeigh children threaten them multiple times and have no intention to stop the game until the inevitable ending.

She’s continually pleading and promising that if she’s let go she won’t tell anyone, but none of the children believes her. Even the epilogue, showing the aftermath of the grisly double murder at the climax, seems to be mocking the reader, asking questions about the eventual fate of the Freedom Five and waxing philosophical about how good things and good people can’t exist in the world.I'm no expert, but I read a lot of psychological horror, and the thoughts going through all of these different heads seemed spot on to me.