Reading in the Dark

The Girl Next Door vs Brother

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

I read two books last week, and the stars aligned in a wicked way. The first was Brother, by Ania Ahlborn. If you don’t recognize the name, Ania Ahlborn is a successful horror indie author who got a publishing deal after she was fed up with rejections from mainstream publishers and decided to self publish. I haven’t read much indie fiction. To be honest, I didn’t know it was a thing until I came to Substack. I put her book on my list because it had great reviews.

When I finished it, I looked at my Audible app and saw that I had around ten books that I hadn’t listened to. One of them was The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. Now if you’re familiar with this novel, you’ll know that the fact that I went in blind, meaning I didn’t read the summary on the back, didn’t look up the book beforehand, set me up for quite a wild ride. The book is purely horrific. I listened to it on my drive to and from work, and one day when I could feel the pull of the story going into the darkness, I had to pull over and stop it.

I see what’s happening here. Can I continue?

It wasn’t bad yet, but I knew it would be, and I was right to slow down and consider it. The story is not for the faint of heart.

The Girl Next Door

Told from the perspective of a neighbor boy David, The Girl Next Door tells the story of Meg and Susan, who are adopted by their Aunt Ruth after their parents die in a car accident. Meg, a beautiful outgoing redhead makes fast friends with David, a frequent guest at Ruth’s home and friends with her three sons. The story starts out quaint, suburban. A summer childhood story spent exploring creeks, reading comic books and going to neighbor’s houses for dinner.

But Ruth, a neighborhood favorite with the young boys, takes a disliking to Meg. What starts out as strict rules and routine punishments begins to border on abuse, and David is often witness to it. Over the summer the beatings increase, and Ruth’s three boys are brought in on it. After Meg tells a police officer, Mr. Jennings who lives in the neighborhood, Ruth refuses to let Meg leave the house.

Vacillating between images of childhood innocence and the budding sexual curiosity of a preteen boy, David details the abuse that takes place in plain sight. By the end, Ruth’s house becomes a haven for torture, abuse and insanity. Worse still, the neighborhood kids join in. A strange mix between Lord of the Flies and Dandelion Wine, this story delves into the depths of human depravity, and the evil that all of us are capable of allowing, if not committing ourselves.

Brother

Michael believes he was adopted by his family, taken in after his parents abandoned him. What he doesn’t know is that he was kidnapped by them, a gift for his estranged older adopted sister, Lora Lynne. He lives in guilt, hating what his family does, but owing them for taking him in. But his loyalty comes with a high price.

Michael’s adoptive family aren’t ordinary people. They live in Appalachia, far from big cities and neighbors. Poor and jobless, they survive off the land to supply their needs, and that includes the vulnerable hitchhikers they find wandering on the sides of the highway. They are murderers.

The home is anything but happy, filled with Momma’s abuse of her only remaining daughter Misty, and the raging temper of his psychopathic brother Ray who goes by Rebel. Michael tries his best to protect Misty and keep Reb at bay, but that means he has to help find the girls that Momma wants.

Everything changes when Reb starts to disobey the family rule and goes into a neighboring town to hang out at a record store. Usually he would dip in to steal a few things and never be seen again, but he likes the girl that works there. And Michael likes her friend and coworker Alice. A budding relationship starts to form, and for the first time in his life, Michael imagines getting away from the farm. Starting a new life somewhere else.

Pulled between the sick cycle of abuse and violence in his home and his chance at a new start, Michael stumbles upon even darker truths within the family as his love story comes to a head on his birthday. A strange tale of poverty, cycles of abuse, and family loyalty, Brother is a violent telling of gaslighting, secrets, psychopathy and Stockholm syndrome.

These two books have a lot of overlapping themes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Ania Ahlborn read The Girl Next Door at some point, and made some of her decisions based on Ruth, the villain and abuser in that story. But I have to tell you, while Brother is a page turner, it doesn’t come close to the literary mastery that Jack Ketchum’s story has. There are reasons for that, and I’ve been turning them over in my mind.

Brother started to bore me. While both books contain extremely disturbing descriptions of violence and abuse, I was taken out of the story quite a bit. What do I mean? It wasn’t visceral. It felt like a laundry list, thing after thing that kept happening, but I was reading it in my own world, from my chair, instead of being inside the story. It’s commonly called telling not showing.

I’m always fascinated by the ability some writers have to pull you into the moment with the character. To make you a witness as if you were living alongside the people in the book. Jack Ketchum’s book does that.

Brother in truth started to feel cheesy. Tropy. I knew what was going to happen at about the halfway mark, which might have contributed to some of my boredom by the end, as the story relied heavily on the shock factor/twist ending. I won’t give it away, but suffice it to say I wasn’t shocked. It also leaned heavily into the gross-out factor that a lot of (in my opinion) bad horror does. Jack Ketchum’s book relies on you knowing what is going to happen, but hoping that it won’t.

Is that same grotesque body horror a part of Jack Ketchum’s book? Absolutely. Is that what made it so disturbing? No. Not that alone. The parts that really got me were not grotesque at all, but were still totally disturbing.

I’ll give you an example.

When I had to pull over in my car and decide whether or not I could finish the book, Meg had given David a painting. A beautiful watercolor she brought over on a rainy day.

This happened following a conversation with David about how no matter what she does, her Aunt Ruth just doesn’t seem to like her. David is incredulous. He’s known Ruth his entire life. Played at her house every week. She’s an easy going single mother to three boys. She gives the neighborhood kids beer. She is lenient and well liked. Cusses like a sailor, but that only makes him like her more.

Meg wants to paint her something, but she knows Ruth would shit all over it. In an effort to prove Meg wrong, David brings the watercolor over the next time he plays at the house, and gives it to Ruth. He is sure she is going to love it.

“This is from Meg,” he says as Meg mouths no in the background, eyes afraid and watching her aunt.

As soon as Ruth finds out that Meg did it, she starts to pick the painting apart. She knows that Meg did it for David and not for her. And what else did David get for that painting, she wants to know. Did Meg do anything with him? Boys after all only want one thing from girls, and it’s not paintings.

Even remembering the scene, the dark shadow cast over Meg’s face as her aunt finishes by saying the painting is rather light. Rather drab in fact. It turned my stomach. Like I said, I hadn’t read what the story was about, but I realized that it was going to go badly. My heart was racing, and I felt the fear that you would if you were a child watching, confused by the subtle grown up manipulation and abuse that I recognize easily in my own adult body, but would struggle to put words to as a kid.

That is real suspense. Real horror to me. Sure, the descriptions in Brother are grotesque, but they are not scary. Not like that. And I think part of what it comes down to is that The Girl Next Door is peeking into something real. Something we read about in newspaper articles or see on the news from time to time.

The slow and crescendoing patterns of darkness that haunt quiet suburban neighborhoods and schools, churches and football fields. The horrors that take place in front of witnesses, but are somehow secret. Too taboo to be talked about. Locked up in dark places that only law enforcement and social workers are keen to. The horrors that are committed by people who are well liked, seemingly normal individuals who might smile and make small talk with you in the store. Now that is some scary shit.

What makes a villain work is when they seem human.

Both books have female villains, abusive and psychopathic mother figures who take their anger and hatred out on girls in particular. They hate femininity and beauty. They see it as a weakness, one that has to be beaten out. And both of them have secrets from their past that have made them what they are.

But in Brother, that character falls flat. There isn’t one scene where you get a glimpse into compassion or feeling beyond hatred and evil. She doesn’t have any connection to a single member of her own family. Is a complete and total psychopath through and through, and she acts like it. And you know what? It’s not convincing. Even Circe in Game of Thrones has an undeniable love for her children. She has to have that element to be interesting. (Unless it’s a monster, some alien creature that we don’t understand. Then its motives can be hunger or instinct, etc.)

The strangest part of evil is that the people who commit even the most heinous acts typically have plenty of family or friends that they never hurt. Never acted violent in front of. Never hinted that they were capable of the awful things they did. Sorry for the easy example, but Hitler had plenty of people in his life who thought he was wonderful. Ted Bundy lived with a girlfriend and her young daughter while he was in the midst of a murder spree. And Dahmer obviously cared about his grandmother and father. Those are real life villains. Real embodiments of evil. And they aren’t two-dimensional. They are capable of showing, even if it is purely a manipulative act, kindness, love and compassion.

Ruth on the other hand is somewhat likable. She seems motivated by teaching Meg. Saving her from what she sees as the pitfall of being a woman. It’s demented and evil and vile. But she has other personality traits besides violence and abuse. She is multifaceted. She pops out of the page. You find yourself sitting in her living room, living through the eyes of David. That is something that I never felt with Brother. The motivations are not convincing. The unfaultering sociopathy grew old. Show me something that confuses me. Makes me realize why Michael feels loyal to this family the way David does to his neighbor Ruth. Show me a human.

The Girl Next Door will always stay with me.

It’s weird how some stories swallow you. Alter your perspective. Actually change the world you see when you wake up and step outside your door. The characters, the heaviness of their plights, I see it in the people around me. In the children I walk past in a grocery store, in the mothers and fathers who grab their kid’s hands too tightly, cordial but with something too stern behind their eyes. It changes the way you feel about humanity.

And Brother, while entertaining and honestly worth a read, will not. Those character arcs are quickly fading from my mind. I can’t take any of what I found in that book with me into the world. The Girl Next Door on the other hand is completely other. It is the goal of horror. The place it has in society the way the comedian does. To remind you that everything is not always okay. That there are stories unfolding around us, maybe even in front of us, that are deserving of action, of heroes, of grief. I can’t say I recommend it because it is so heavy. But if you can read it, I think you should, and tuck away the stubborn dignity and strength of the little girl Meg whose life fell into the hands of a monster.