About The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum’s novel follows the captivity and escalating torture of a teenage girl by neighborhood children, a story loosely based on a real-life crime. Brutal and confrontational, it examines how cruelty spreads through ordinary people, how communities look away, and how horror can arise from human complicity rather than the supernatural.
Reading signals
- Spice
- None
- Darkness
- Extreme
- Pacing
- Balanced
Content warnings
- child-abuse
- child-death
- domestic-abuse
- emotional-abuse
- physical-abuse
- rape
- sexual-assault
- sexual-violence
- torture
- violence
- kidnapping
- murder
- gore
- confinement
- animal cruelty
