The Girl Next Door

A teenage girl is held captive and brutally tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable.

"The Girl Next Door is alive...in a way most works of popular fiction never attain; it does not just promise terror but actually delivers it. But it's a page-turner, all right; no doubt about that." Stephen King

"This is the real stuff, horror embedded in genuine literature, an uncomfortable dip into the pitch blackness in the underside of the American literary tradition." Edward Bryant, Locus

"[T]he thing that makes The Girl Next Door so disturbing: the fact that the reader, even though repulsed by the story, cannot look away. The Girl Next Door is definitely NOT for the faint of heart." Cemetery Dance Magazine

"Realism is what makes this novel so terrifying...the monsters..are human, and all the more horrifying for it." Mike Baker, Afraid Magazine

The Bram Stoker Award-winning author explores the darkest corner of human nature in this novel — based on a true story — about a woman who enlists her own children to torture a helpless girl she is hiding in her basement. Includes two bonus short stories.

In suburbia in the 1950s, a dark side emerges for teenage Meg and her crippled sister — captive to an Aunt, who is descending into madness.

Jack Ketchum is the pseudonym for a former actor, teacher, literary agent, lumber salesman, and soda jerk. He is also a former flower child and baby boomer who figures that in 1956 Elvis, dinosaurs and horror probably saved his life. His first novel, Off Season, an updating of the Sawney Beane story, prompted the Village Voice to publicly scold its publisher in print for publishing violent pornography. He has always wondered what they would think of The Girl Next Door. His short story "The Box" won a 1994 Bram Stoker Award and he has written nine novels, including the sequel to Off Season, Offspring, and Red.