The Truth May be Stranger, but Fiction Has Power

The Truth May be Stranger, But Fiction Has Power

01/28/2006

On October 26, 1965, Indianapolis police answered a call saying that a girl had died. The call came from a pay telephone in front of a Shell station in a poor section of the city. The caller was a teenaged boy whose voice had not finished changing into that of an adult man. He sounded very nervous and directed the police to the address, 3850 East New York Street, at which they would find the dead female.

When the cops got to the dingy, rundown, clapboard home to which the anonymous caller had directed them, they found the emaciated dead body of 16-year-old Sylvia Marie Likens. She was covered with bruises and small wounds, later revealed to be cigarette and match burns that numbered over 100. There were also large areas where the outer layer of skin had peeled off. Likens also had a large letter "3" branded on her chest. However, the most remarkable injuries, by far, were the words in block letters that had been burned directly onto her stomach: "I'M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!"¹

Certainly a story like this seems like excellent fodder for a novelist.² Few things could be more eerie than a group of teenaged children being lead by a crazed single mother to for all practical purposes, kidnap, torture, and murder a young girl. In one of his most sought after texts, The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum, a master of horrifying stories that delve into the darkest shadows of the human heart, many of these tales based on real events, produces a raw, powerful, unsettling narrative. Although I cannot say that The Girl Next Door ranks among his best works, his story of Meg Loughlin's abuse, torture, and death has its moments of brilliance.

What Ketchum does extremely well is create a context, turning what could simply be, in the hands of a less subtle author, a novel featuring torture and death, into an examination of the reality of human brutality. He does this by choosing as his narrator the young boy who blew the whistle on his deranged neighbors and made the phone call to the police. Ketchum's David is a few years younger than sixteen year old Meg, yet the two hit it off instantly when they meet near the neighborhood pond. David is trapping crawdads when they meet, and Ketchum immediately lets readers into the minds of the two as he has neither keep the small creatures, which would surely mean their death. Nor does he have either torture them.

David, Meg, and Meg's crippled sister Susan are a stark contrast to the other kids in the neighborhood, who are epitomized in the ten-year-old named Ralphie (nicknamed Woofer). When we first meet this future fine, upstanding citizen, he is catching nightcrawlers—so he can place them, still wriggling and very much alive, on a newly disturbed ant hill. David's response is anything but a "boys will be boys" dismissal. He views Woofer as basically being one sick, demented little bastard. But Woofer is very close to par for the course, compared to the kids around him. The accelerant in these children's slow burn towards full-fledged dementia is David's next door neighbor, a single mother named Ruth.

Ruth is based on Gertrude Baniszewski, the real life single mom who was left in charge of two young girls (in addition to her four children), and who went over the deep end and orchestrated the ritualistic, ongoing torture of one of them, involving children as young as eleven in her insanity. Ketchum makes Ruth a little more likable than her real life counterpart. The kids in the neighborhood see her as one of the "cool adults." And readers are lead to feel a at least a little pity for this woman whose husband has absconded, leaving her with children and no visible means of financial support. Though she is not portrayed as overtly sick (we never see her enjoying the torture of animals), she is troubled. She emotionally abuses Meg and Susan, who have come to live with her after their parents have died in an accident.³ In another scene, she burns caterpillars alive when they are found in her trees, but she does this joylessly; she simply sees it as something that must be done to avoid an infestation of parasites.

Still, Ketchum offers enough evidence to account for Ruth's going from being verbally abusive, to her going over the edge and becoming a torturer (it has to do with Meg's calling the police on her). While it is not uncommon to see stories of someone in Ruth's situation become instantly physically abusive, much as a young mother who suddenly snaps and beats a young child's head against a wall, it is much more rare that such people, who seem to have no history of sadism, to choose to lock up, systematically torture, and kill someone. Finally, Ketchum offers some long-term perspective on this tale of torture: The novel opens and closes with an adult David, now on his third marriage, still haunted by memories of Meg's death and his subsequent revenge on Ruth.

Although I would not rank The Girl Next Door with Red or She Wakes, I think it holds up well when compared to Ketchum's other fictionalizations of true crime, namely Off Season (c. 1980, re-released 1995) and Joyride (1995). I think there is an inherent limitation in the use of a young narrator who is dragged along when the group participates in torture (he never actively participates). Such a character would have to have extremely complex thoughts, which are not easily expressed by a thirteen year old, given the situation. David delivers his monologue a little too matter-of-factly for my tastes. He delves on his complicity only in as much depth as he needs to in order to exonerate himself. One cannot help but wonder whether Susan, the crippled sister, who was forced to witness all of this, might not have been a better narrator.

Nonetheless, I recommend The Girl Next Door for readers who have a strong stomach, as well as for Ketchum fans in general. Certainly, one could argue that the true story on which it is based is perhaps more engaging in its reality. However, the novel makes more real the pain suffered by the victim. The novel also affords an in depth view into the minds of seemingly ordinary people who become sadistic and heartless when hypnotized by mob mentality.

¹From The Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. Accessed Jan. 28, 2006. <http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/young/likens/1.html>

²Two non-fictional accounts of the incident have been published: Dean, John. The Indiana Torture Slaying: Sylvia Likens' Ordeal and Death. 2nd ed. Brownsville, KY: Borf Books, 1999. 187 p., and Millett, Kate. The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. 341 p.

³In reality, the two girls were abandoned by their parents, who went off to find work in a carnival.