Let's Go Play at the Adams

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I won’t dive too far into my thoughts on how bad things are currently, but this book felt like it was written for this year, for 2019, not 1974.

A series of small victories inflicted on this woman who represents, in their minds, the entire unfeeling, egotistical adult world.com are from people who say that they've thrown the book away in disgust or even destroyed it after having read it, and one person admitted to burning it! I found his descriptions to the point and some spots were breathtaking with its thought-provoking questions. Instead of the backdrop of Vietnam, the sequel is set twenty years later at the time of the Gulf War. When the story is so dark and heavy, you need a bit of a breather sometimes, and you didn’t get much of that with this novel. You’ve probably heard of this book and its cult status before, but if not, this review will have a few spoilers in it; spoilers I actually read in other reviews.

The reason it doesn't work is because Johnson's choice for the motivation for their actions was not very compelling. Barbara is hired to work as a babysitter and caretaker of the Adams’ house and their two children, Bobby and Cindy, while they spend a week away. Because we’re being shown something terrifying or disturbing or just kinda squicky, there’s a distancing that authors do, whether it’s the injection of black humor, the killer being a masked unstoppable monster, or simply the evil torturer being so horrifyingly evil that they couldn’t possibly exist.There seems to be no redeeming human quality in them, no chance that one could have a spark of realization of what they are doing to a fellow human being and save their victim. Maybe, as a late teen, my friends and I were so eager to jump into freedom from our parents that we no longer counted ourselves as kids and the adults our enemies.