I was finishing up this book while visiting with my stepdad today. A 10-year-old neighbor came over and brought a few items from the corner store along with his change. I then warned my stepdad about trusting kids with his money and the danger of letting them step foot into his house. He just looked at me funny. When I got home, I side-eyed my 13-year old neighbor who was sitting on the balcony and wondered just what cruelties he was capable of inflicting on the adults in his life. Redemption Equals Death: In Game's End, a now-teenaged Bobby dies saving a girl who he thought was drowning. She wasn't really drowning, she thought he was cute and was just trying to get his attention. Say what you will about Bobby, but this does redeem him somewhat. LET'S GO PLAY has a different set up but it gets to the meat of the story right off the bat. This was where I began to realize that there was going to be a lot of psychology in this book. Not only in the captive's head, but in the heads of the children as well. We have kids varying in age from 17 down to 10. We get to peek inside the heads of all of them. I'm no expert, but I read a lot of psychological horror, and the thoughts going through all of these different heads seemed spot on to me. Everyone here acted their ages, and their inner thoughts reflected their later actions. OK, I am their new toy. Like Terry said. I walk, I talk when they let me. They can move my arms and legs. They can even dress and undress me if they want. But how do they play with dolls?” Fatal Flaw: Barbara manages to get the upper hand and fight off her captors and nearly forces them to free her... all while still bound and gagged, but relents at the last second because she can't bear to hurt Dianne any more than she already is.

Those of you with your fingers on the Horror Reanimated pulse – er, I mean flatline – will know I rarely review books. However, every now and again something truly unique comes along. Mendal Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is one of those books.

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We also get a look into both the interior lives of Barbara and her captors. The children, apart from their horrifying actions, are made to look as much as they can like people. Immature, terrifying people who do whatever they feel like because they can and think up convoluted justifications for why they should hurt a human being as part of their game, but people nonetheless. Hearing Barbara’s thoughts as she’s continually put in helpless situations makes you wish she could break out, and forces you to care about her as she slowly loses her mind. Giving the Freedom Five their own interior lives and thoughts, normalizing them but not humanizing them, ups the horror because we can’t point to these children as some kind of monstrous aberration. When asked why they can’t just stop, they still give childish justifications like “we’re playing a game and you lost,” or “we just can’t, that’s all, we all voted.” There’s nothing elaborate or ungrounded about any of it, and it’s one of the many details that reminds the reader these are, more or less, ordinary children. Ugliness is not a fault of horror literature, it’s an attribute. Darkness is, unfortunately, a part of the human condition. We can choose to pretend it doesn’t exist, or we can try to understand it. We can trivialize it, or recognize its sinister impact. After all, what makes horror horror is empathy. If you can’t sympathize with the victim, it’s not scary. Good writers know how to do this, and the bad ones at least try. But I firmly believe, if more people read horror, more would understand how it feels to be hurt. To be marginalized, taken advantage of, or tortured. To be raped. by Carla Davis 3 years ago It’s not unusual for the most compelling true crime stories to become books and movies, and Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is one of the most sought after examples of fact-to-fiction literature. I had so many different thoughts running through my head with this novel, that I actually had to start myself a little review notebook where I could put all my thoughts on paper. This is going to be a long review… I can already feel it. Les Yay - The epilogue suggests that Barbara's roommate may have had a crush on her...or maybe not. It's a little vague.

As the children became more powerful and Barbara became more objectified, the children changed in disturbing ways. As Barbara thought: She chews these over with an unconscious grinding of her jaw. Were she younger, were she a different girl altogether, she would be absently nibbling on a strand of her own hair, twisted ‘round her finger and brought to her lips as she thought.

While watching the children for the first four days, prim and proper, beautiful and athletic Barbara became the object of eroticism for the children. They have fallen in love with her, a love that is filled with resentment against Barbara’s assuming of the adult role. They fantasized about the games they would play with her. Games that involved imprisoning and possessing the object of their eroticism, an object that is also a symbol of adult control. After four days, they imprisoned her in a game of their own making. They did it because they wanted to know that it can be done. They wanted to know that it is possible to reverse the adult/child, warden/ward roles, in which the “adult” does the punishing/reward if the “child” behaves accordingly. When Barbara asked Bobby “Why?” did they do it. He answered because “it’d be fun,” in the way young children can answer, unreflecting, unsympathetic and egocentric. But what Barbara didn’t count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it — their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society’s sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.