Let's Go Play at the Adams

Product Information

A sequel In Name Only , Lets Go Play At The Adams 2 aka Visiting the Adams, written and apparently self-published by Peter Francis, can be found on Kindle Unlimited. This book often gets compared to Jack Ketchum's novel The Girl Next Door, and while there are obviously similarities, I thinks it's a very different book.

Fatal Flaw: Barbara manages to get the upper hand and fight off her captors and nearly forces them to free her.

Because this book has developed a bit of a cult-like status amongst horror aficionados, I’ve decided to delve deeper into this tale than I normally do with reviews. Barbara was an attractive 20 year old competitive swimmer whose summer job was to baby-sit the Adams’ children, Cindy (age 10) and Bobby (age 13), while their parents are away for 10 days. Forgetting this, then, is the mistake made by Barbara, a college girl hired to care for the young Adams children in their home along a river in rural New England. He was frequently described as having different ticks and spasms which at one point suggested maybe Tourette’s or schizophrenia.

But Barbara wakes up to find herself tightly tied to a bed and gagged, with the faces of her charges—and three of their neighbor friends—grinning down at her.

The kids range in age from 10 to 17, and Barbara is tasked with babysitting the Adams children, Bobby who is 13 and Cindy, while their parents are in Europe for a week. But because the characters' motivations seemed so unrealistic to me, so did their actions, and I found myself quite detached from the whole story. More than a terrifying horror story, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications. I just found the writing style a little disjoined at times, I think it would have benefitted from better editing. It stands as a strange and utterly true testament to the uniquely separate mind children have from adults and the dark nature we so quickly forget when we grow out of it.

We need horrible, hard-to-watch films like Blackfish or Blood Diamond, and we need stories like this one to show us what it’s like to be a victim of someone else’s games. The Adams’ are newer to the town but as Mr Adams is the local doctor, they’ve been welcomed with open arms. Let’s Go Play At the Adams’’ has become sought after and is often featured on wish lists of books people most desire to own. One fine morning, she finds herself tied spread-eagle to the bed, gagged with a washcloth, and under guard by Bobby, Cindy, and their friends.

It was brutal in its descriptions of what happened to her, and I felt like I somehow owed it to her to keep reading until the end. Took a Level in Badass: Barbara almost manages to fight her way to freedom, all while still tied up. At the heart, there's the same soul sickness, the same nihilistic sense that the world is an empty and cruel place. Sheryl Friedlander, writing for The Tampa Tribune, compared the novel favorably to The Collector and Lord of the Flies, praising its "style and flow of thought" as "smooth and interesting. There hasn’t been anything specific to link the case directly with the story, other than the same use of one of the children, and the similarity of a young female being imprisoned before being killed.

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. instead their works have an almost ironic distance from the material that encourages contemplation of - rather than engulfment by - that material. The emotional beats are played just as evilly and with just as much cutoff as anything Barbara experiences, showing us an open door and then immediately and cruelly slamming it shut, closing off every exit on the route to Hell one by one until there’s no escape. You get to watch the justifications, the slow progression, the frog in the pot who's ignoring the slowly rising heat.I cruised through this paperback, my first physical read in about two years, which is now my 80 th book read this year (at the time of writing this). As someone who has dealt with some mental health issues and spent time thinking about what happens when we die, I found Johnson’s thought process about this fascinating.