I didn’t expect to like The Girl Next Door. I’m still not sure that like is even the correct word - unsettled might be closer to how I felt when I finished, getting up from my bed and walking to my kitchen where I stood for a moment, silent, contemplating what I had just read. I had known, going into it, that it was based on a true story - the abuse and murder of Sylvia Likens in 1965. I had known how it ended - with the narrator, Davey, attempting to rescue Meg but failing, a rescue attempt that never occurred in the story it was based upon. What I hadn’t known was how the book would turn my gaze back at me - making me question in which I - in which everyone - looks the other way in the face of suffering.
I had assumed, going into it, that Davey was author Jack Ketchum’s attempt to ‘fix’ the story, to give the victim a hero she lacked in life and thus to resolve his own discomfort with how the story had actually played out. And in a way, he is. Davey kills Meg’s abuser, Ruth, at the end of the novel, after an abortive attempt at rescuing her that ends with him imprisoned alongside her. The children who tortured Meg are sent to juvenile detention, her sister to a foster family whom she seems to get along with. The details we change when we tell a story - when we retell a story, when we take something that was real and make it fiction - can be revealing. Sylvia had no Davey; almost everyone in her life was complicit in her abuse.
But - Davey is complicit too. He does not participate in the torture that his friends inflict upon Meg - but he is there for much of it, a silent witness, unable to look away. There is no action he can take to help Meg - just as the reader can do nothing to help her, only make the continual, conscious choice to read on, watching her suffering unfold. Davey’s choice is the same choice that we all make each day, when we are made aware of injustice and still take no action. We face the same paradox that he does - too often, there is likely nothing we can do to help regardless. Early on in the novel, when Meg shares that she thinks that Ruth dislikes her, Davey attempts to help by giving Ruth a painting that Meg made for him and claiming that it was made for Ruth instead. This backfires; Ruth clocks immediately that the painting was made for Davey, not her, and says that girls are easy to manipulate with kindness - and insinuates that Meg may have repaid Davey’s kindness with sexual favors. From that point until his attempted rescue near the end of the novel, Davey makes no more attempts to help Meg. Later, when Meg is forbidden from leaving her house, the emotion that Davey feels is relief: “it was out of my hands. Or so I thought. That was a relief to me [...] I knew that things had taken a pretty unusual turn next door and I guess I was looking for some distance from it for a while, to sort things out for myself.” Perhaps, with Meg's absence, he can assuage himself of responsibility by simply forgetting that she is there at all.
Davey finds that he cannot retreat from what he knows - it spirals out, implicating the entire neighborhood. Almost everyone is in connivance with everyone else, an idea introduced early on, by Ruth, after Meg briefly flees the house after striking one of Ruth’s sons, who groped her. Since Meg is not available to be punished, Ruth decides that she will punish her sister Susan, instead, as Susan was in “connivance” with Meg. Why? As Ruth says, “Your share’s for not saying, hey, cut that out, Meg—sister or no sister. Right’s right.” Which, of course, describes how Davey acts throughout most of the novel. And Davey is not alone in this connivance. Nearly every child in the neighborhood - lured in by Ruth’s reputation as a ‘fun’ parent who provides children with snacks and beer - at least witnesses the abuse of Meg, and everyone named in Davey’s friend group (Willie, Woofer, Donny, Eddie, and Denise) is an active participant. Adults, when told of what is happening, not only ignore the abuse, but justify it. Early in the novel, when Meg informs a police officer of her abuse at the hands of Ruth, he tells her ““that’s her right [...]For all I know your parents would’ve felt exactly the same way. Who’s to say? You’ve got to think of Miz Chandler as your mom now.” Later, Tony Morino, a neighborhood boy, reports what is happening to his mother, but, as Donny describes it “Lucky for us the Morinos are real strict Catholics. His mom said she probably deserved it, she’s probably loose or something. She said parents have a right, and Ruth’s her mother now.”
And Davey, in trying to make sense of all of this, only discovers more ways in which everyone he knows is in connivance - including his own family. His father reveals that he knows that Eddie’s father beats him - though he immediately backtracks, trying to hide from his son the fact that he is complicit. And through their conversation, Davey realizes that his father has likely hit his mother, and likely done it more than once - another piece of information that he can do nothing with. It can only haunt him. He feels that he too is guilty, even if he did not directly participate: “You could go to the cops, I thought. You could go see Mr. Jennings. And then I thought, great, and tell him what? That Ruth’s been torturing Meg for months and I know she has for a fact because I’ve sort of been helping? I’d seen enough cop shows to know what an accomplice was.” Davey’s description of the situation - he’s “sort of” been helping - is telling. Any material help provided to Ruth by Davey has been essentially nonexistent - he has, in fact, attempted to minimize the harm done to Meg repeatedly; for example, when Meg was first tied up he convinced Ruth’s children to put an additional book under her feet, to reduce the strain on her body. But just as often, he has done nothing at all, simply watching in silence.
This silence leaves a lingering question: is Davey merely unable to act, or does he secretly approve of Ruth’s actions? Early on, the novel draws parallels between his inner desires and those of his more sadistic peers. When Meg first moves into the neighborhood, Davey immediately has a crush on her. He accompanies his friends when they decide to try and spy on Meg’s bedroom in hopes of seeing her undressing; each pair of boys that attempts to see through her window fails, and becomes angry with her when they do, blaming her for their failed voyeurism. At first, Davey is confused by this, but when it is his turn to attempt to spy on her and he too fails to do so, he feels the same emotion: “And now I knew exactly how the others had felt and exactly why they had looked mad at her, mad at Meg - because it felt like it was her fault, as though she was the one who’d got us up her in the first place and promised so much and delivered nothing.”
More haunting still: Davey and all his friends had rehearsed the torture of Meg before they even knew who she was. Before her arrival at the Chandler’s house, they had all played a game they called Commando, a kind of variation of King of the Hill - except the loser of Commando faces a special punishment: they are tied to a tree and the winners are allowed to do whatever they want to them. The Commando, Davey notes, always loses: the game is a form of ritualized play, an excuse to justify their physical torture afterwards. Their physical and their sexual torture - at some point before Meg’s arrival in the neighborhood, Eddie’s sister Denise had willingly joined the game, and always took the role of the Commando (and thus, the inevitable loser). The game presages the abuse of Meg - the desire to participate in the torture of another person was already there, even in Denise, who played the victim, even in Davey, who would later demur from the torture.1 Watching the torture of Meg forces Davey to confront the possibility that this may have been something that he wanted all along - a question that the reader, who has also passively watched these events unfold, must ask themself as well.
This is not to suggest that participating in imaginary or consensual violence automatically implies a desire to do so in reality; only that it did in this specific case.