Let's Go Play at the Adams

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Johnson never allows the reader to turn away, and forces all of the despicable acts that are performed on Barbara to be read in painstaking detail. An interesting note I’ll add here instead of further on, in the Further Reading section – from the link I’ll provide, it appears as though Mr Johnson detested children (though he himself had two daughters from his first marriage) which adds further intrigue to the basis of this story using children as the main characters.

While this book sounds like it’s going to be a quick, dark story about the kidnapping and torture of a babysitter, it’s actually a lot slower than that and there isn’t a huge amount of the torture in front of our eyes. I can’t help but draw comparisons here to Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door (a story which is based on true events). Johnson's writing expresses the thoughts and feelings of these characters without judgment and with little interruption, giving the story an interestingly isolated feeling, not unlike that found in 50s and 60s family television. No fewer than two people have written “sequels” giving it a much happier ending, restoring some optimism to the gruesomely bleak final moments. Everyone knows this now, but a reader going into "Let's Go Play" completely blind back in 1974 would certainly come out with the shock of a lifetime.

My own kids started screaming at each other while I am writing this review, both sounding like Bette Davis screeching at Joan Crawford. Boring and repetitive as well as sickening, there is almost nothing to redeem this depressing failure. Some have likened this to an adolescent version of Wes Craven's shocking Last House on the Left and I guess there are similarities - the challenging of authority, the misguided following of peer pressure, the myopic view of the world, the ruin of innocence. I highly recommend this book to those who can read the book and truly grasp the message of the tale.

An interesting side note is that Mr Johnson passed away in 1976 at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver. Cindy doesn’t feature in the novel an awful lot, but when she does she’s simply a bored young girl who doesn’t fully understand the reality of what’s happening.I was struck time and time again by Johnson’s philosophical musings told through the mind, eyes or mouth of a child character. Thanks to "Paperbacks From Hell" respawning interest in almost forgotten horror titles from the golden age, "Let's Go Play" is enjoying new readership and gaining some notoriety. It’s a book that has a profound effect on people, one that keeps horror fans looking for it almost as much as it makes them breathe a sigh of relief that it remained (until recently released as part of the Paperbacks From Hell collection of reprints) incredibly scarce. Does someone acquire the rights and give it a grand re-release with a new hardcover, a new foreword and some essay’s from horror heavyweights about the impact the book has?

Bobby wanted to be involved and wanted John and Dianne’s approval, but he also didn’t want to hurt Barbara.

It made me think about a lot of questions the book asked and the story and the characters will be with me for many moons. Giving the Freedom Five their own interior lives and thoughts, normalizing them but not humanizing them, ups the horror because we can’t point to these children as some kind of monstrous aberration. Dianne, John and Paul have become such good friends with Bobby and Cindy that they’ve created their own club – Freedom Five and they like to play games. The book itself has a grim backstory: based on the murder of Sylvia Likens (which also inspired An American Crime and The Girl Next Door), and intended as an unflinching look into the nature of human cruelty, the dark material and the questions it raised eventually led the author, a recovering alcoholic, to resume drinking, resulting in his early death from cirrhosis of the liver less than two years after the novel's publication and giving the book a singular reputation as the novel that killed its own author. The horrendous act within the book appears to have been used as a device for the author to discuss the difficulties of peer pressure and as I mentioned before, what happens when someone doesn’t stand up to the group.

I think children make such convincing agents of evil because in all of their innocence, their moral compass hasn’t been firmly set yet.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. He is instantly attracted to Barbara and determines that she can become his ‘practice’ girlfriend so that he won’t be embarrassed or ashamed when he gets a real girlfriend. More than a terrifying horror story, Let's Go Play at the Adams' is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications.