The Girl Next Door was published by Warner Books in 1989. The novel is based on one of the most horrifying crimes in American history: the torture and murder of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski and a group of neighborhood children in Indianapolis in 1965. Ketchum transposes the case to 1950s suburban New Jersey and tells the story through the eyes of David, a twelve-year-old boy who witnesses the abuse of Meg Loughlin, a teenage girl placed with Ruth Chandler, a divorced mother of three boys.
Ruth’s abuse of Meg begins with verbal cruelty and progresses, over the course of a summer, through physical violence, sexual humiliation, and torture — each step witnessed by Ruth’s children and the neighborhood kids, who participate with varying degrees of enthusiasm, coercion, and guilt. David watches, horrified, unable to intervene and unable to look away. His failure to act — the failure of the bystander, the “good person” who does nothing — is the novel’s true subject.
Ketchum’s achievement is to make the reader occupy David’s position: watching, comprehending, and doing nothing. The prose is deliberately restrained — no Gothic excess, no supernatural intervention, no distance created by stylization. The horror is entirely human, entirely realistic, and the reader’s inability to put the book down implicates them in exactly the way that David’s inability to leave the basement implicates him.
Stephen King called it “the most disturbing novel I’ve ever read,” and the assessment is fair. The book was adapted into a film in 2007 and inspired a companion film, An American Crime, the same year.
Collecting The Girl Next Door
First edition (Warner Books, New York, 1989): Mass market paperback.
Market values:
- First edition paperback, fine: $30–$80
- Overlook Connection hardcover edition: $100–$300 (signed/limited)
- Very good paperback: $10–$30