The Girl Next Door

Every word. Every vision. Every realistic scenery crumbled into me. Shattered its pieces in my mind.
Ketchum's idea with his fascinating choice of words and their American flavor (slangs, new age words, etc) caught my eye from the first beginning. The transgression beyond the borders of humanity is something that didn't occur in this book out of the blue. It was a gradual opening of the other side. The side of abjection, slowly pulling the band-aid and thus you'll see a glittering violence. I'm a great fan of true crime, shock horror, and even more to the extent of transgressive fiction. Experiencing this book was even more realistic to me, than reading the case of Junko Furuta online. The way the unreliable -mostly pain in the ass - narrator went through the features of American issues in a deep deep path. Misogyny, extreme traditionalism and family structure was being gazed at, with a sense of innocence and honesty, and sometimes, stupidity, from the lenses of a 12 year-old child. A child raising this question that how you would act when the criminal is under-age. When children do something beyond question. When misogyny exists in the hands of a victim of misogyny. As a middle-eastern girl here reading Jack Ketchum, I felt Meg. A girl living in Eastern part of a country miles away from me. Though with two different ages, cultures and lives. I felt her as a victim, and a girl. With all my being.I never been to America. Never had the chance to learn about the nuances of living in each state. However, I know ketchum portrayed the images of livinvg in a small town in eastern US. The problems, the conventions, all the good and bads without pretentiousness. I heard before that living in these kinds of small towns in some states are even not safe sometimes. But they were the narratives of migrants, feeling the heartbeat of a young American girl, as If I live there myself, depicts that how Ketchum was good with writing this shit! As a middle-eastern girl I felt like I'm dealing with these issues myself, in a nowhere shitland in America. I felt like how brave you must be to vividly showcase the details of problematic life-styles in U.S.A. A country these days with too much contradictions, regarding the issues Ketchum pointed fingers to.
Horror was not something driven from the outside world. This kind of horror fiction started having a form in America, with Allan Poe's petrifying Telltale Heart. Another story shading from the fears of a normal man (a psychopath though) who is becoming something the norms hate. Published in a time when horror was a taboo and got censored several times in Christian schools, Telltale heart was not happening on the outside. It was inside us. It was the deepest fears of a fearsome mad killer. We don't know how much we might bypass the boundaries until a source of power stops us, or well... Encourages us. The Girl Next Door is a story of abjection with its true form. The true domino of violence, a victim in her teens, allowing the products of her victim era to make another victim deeply rotten. The cycle goes on, until it's too late. The most captivating word for me was when the police realized about everything and entered, when it was too late. He told that incel narrator “Were you the kept or the keeper”
And when the narrator said he wasn't involved, the police answered “But you didn't help her either”

It needs not only talent but a pure bravery to write such a narrator in a place full of filth and misogyny. It takes risks to write about an indecisive, passive observer of violence who is dealing with the problem every damn time. It gives us the question about observers of violence in today's world. Is it the pleasure of being accepted by the system of power that makes them silent, a mere cowardice? Or is it more complicated than that.

Rest In Peace. Jack Ketchum