The Girl Next Door

Suburbia in the 1950s, a dark side emerging in the Chandler house for teenage Meg and her crippled little sister Susan--captive to an Aunt, who is rapidly descending into madness. ""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

Jack Ketchum is the author of the novels Off Season, Hide and Seek, Cover, The Girl Next Door, She Wakes, Joyride, Stranglehold, Offspring, Red, Ladies' Night. The Lost, and arguably, Right to Life. His short fiction is collected in The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex, and Peaceable Kingdom. His novels have been translated into Japanese, French, Greek, Russian, and Italian. In 1994, his story "The Box" won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction, and his story "Gone" won the same award in 2000. Stephen King has said of him that, "no writer who has read him can help being influenced by him, and no general reader who runs across his work can easily forget him." In his introduction to Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition, Douglas E. Winter writes, "When I read Off Season, I knew that its writer was different, that he was working from that raw and risky perspective known as personal vision... [It was] the genuine article, its horrors insistent, visceral, and disturbing." Ketchum lives in New York City.