Johnson, Grady Hendr Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. Want to Read. Delete Note Save Note. Check nearby libraries Library. Share this book Facebook. February 13, History. Ugh… I read this book, or some of it, when I was about What were my parents thinking?!
It was so disturbing I still try not to think about it. Thanks for reminding me.. Let your children stand guard and defend the castle on the West Hill by ducking and diving between the ropes and holding the fort. Manoeuvre through the small spaces to confront the fire-breathing dragon. We also serve great coffee! Made possible by House of Play. The Fair Balance your way along the tightrope and across the sea to the circus inspired fairground. The Beach Take a dip and dive through our very own beach, where the tots and babies have their own space to adventure through the deep sea of Hastings.
The Castle Let your children stand guard and defend the castle on the West Hill by ducking and diving between the ropes and holding the fort. It begins with the what-if premise of Barbara being saved at the last minute, and the kids' activities exposed as a result , and explores the resulting media frenzy and criminal trials, as well as Barbara's physical and emotional recovery from her ordeal.
Had Schneebeli's project gone to press, it might have brought the original book out of obscurity. In , Let's Go Play at the Adams ', long out of print due to a complicated tangle of rights issues, was finally republished by Valancourt Press.
Community Showcase More. Follow TV Tropes. You need to login to do this. Shelves: scary-stuff , read Barbara is a 20 year old college student who likes kids and needed some extra money. She agrees to sit with Bobby and Cindy. Little does she know that these dang kids are the demon reborn.
They along with 3 of their friends take Barbara hostage. Torture and rape are on the agenda. These kids see it as playing a game. They are the Freedom Five after all. Little bastards. This book scared the hell out of me. I can see this happening. Kids live in their own world. Some of them don't see their ac Barbara is a 20 year old college student who likes kids and needed some extra money. Some of them don't see their actions as having consequences.
I lived with a 16 year old girl who had some mental issues. Scared shitless I say! One of the "kids" in this book is 17 years old! That little pyscho just went along with the gang. This book will stick with you for awhile. Thanks mark for the copy I adore you. But I do want the book out of my house too! View all 14 comments. I imagine if you are reading this review you fall under 1 of 3 categories: 1 You've already read this book, so you are curious about my opinion, 2 you want to read this book, in which case you should stop reading this right now because spoilers lurk ahead, or 3 you have no intention of ever reading this book, and yet you are drawn to my review out of curiosity.
So here's the deal. I needed to read this book for a couple of reasons. First, this book is out of print, and you usually cannot find I imagine if you are reading this review you fall under 1 of 3 categories: 1 You've already read this book, so you are curious about my opinion, 2 you want to read this book, in which case you should stop reading this right now because spoilers lurk ahead, or 3 you have no intention of ever reading this book, and yet you are drawn to my review out of curiosity.
That's a steal, so I snatched it up. The second reason I needed to read this book is the controversy around it. Written in , readers were so appalled by Johnson's book, that some claimed they destroyed it immediately after reading it or felt physically ill. Johnson passed away two years after its publication, so he never got to see it achieve cult status, but it sounds like he wasn't very popular before his death.
Hendrix revisits a lot of the popular horror fiction of the 70's and 80s', and he gives Let's Go Play at the Adams' an entire 2 page spread. I skipped those pages when I read the book last year, knowing that I would come back to them after reading Johnson's novel.
I didn't want anything spoiled for me. So we have a cult status horror novel that's so despicable people either tore it to pieces or felt like vomiting upon finishing it. It's also incredibly hard to find at a price most people are willing to pay. I was intrigued. 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.
Both involve a group of children with a hive mentality, but while Ketchum's novel is about kids acting on base desires and sociopathic instincts that seem OK to them because they have the full approval of an adult, Johnson's novel is about a very different group of kids.
In Let's Go Play at the Adams', Barbara is the unfortunate victim of a game devised by 4 highly intelligent and well to do kids who have been friends for years. I say 4 because the fifth child, Cindy, is only 10 when the novel occurs, and can't really be considered an architect of such a foul plan at that age, although she is involved.
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. The enormous house is isolated on the Eastern shore of Maryland, with the closest neighbors being not very close. Those neighbors are the McVeigh's, and their children have been friends with the Adams' for years. Dianne is the oldest at 17, and the natural leader of the group.
Her brothers, John who is 16, and mentally unstable Paul who is 13, like Bobby, make up what the children call The Freedom Five. They have been playing games together for years now, and those games have gradually become sadistic in nature.
They practice tying each other up, forcing each other to go with out clothes while restrained, and even mild forms of torture. But these children are effluent and clever, and they soon become bored with the games they play with each other that can only go so far.
When Barbara arrives, a new idea for a game begins to take shape. As you can imagine, things go very horribly wrong for Barbara. The children chloroform her one night and bind her to her bed, really just doing it in the beginning to see if they can get away with it.
Once they realize they have full control of Barbara, and that she is completely unable to escape, the game escalates, and pretty much goes exactly where you would expect it to.
I have to admit that I held out hope toward the end. Barbara's confinement and torture are a slow burn, and we learn a lot about each of the characters as the children become bolder. This makes the story even harder to read, because we know that Bobby has grown tired of the game, and actually feels bad for Barbara. For a while Cindy even tires of having complete freedom, and considers releasing Barbara out of boredom and because she genuinely likes the young woman. But the McVeigh children threaten them multiple times and have no intention to stop the game until the inevitable ending.
John and Dianne are clearly sociopaths, and Dianne is highly intelligent. Paul is barely able to function, and is almost certainly a psychopath. So toward the end, when we dread the obvious outcome, and Bobby actually seems to waver and consider stopping such a monstrous game, the reader grasps desperately at a shred of hope.
Alas, The Freedom Five has too much influence on him, and we learn that poor Barbara never really stood a chance. This book is definitely hard to read and unflinchingly savage. Johnson never allows the reader to turn away, and forces all of the despicable acts that are performed on Barbara to be read in painstaking detail. I cannot say that I enjoyed this book.
I read this one so that I could check off a horror cult classic box. I read it just so that I could say I read it and have an opinion about it. I've actually considered selling my copy now. I could probably get a nice sum for it, but I can't decide. The events that occur in this book are so repugnant that I feel sort of dirty making money off of it. It will probably go on my shelf, and become a show piece. A book that I can say I read just for the experience of saying I read it.
Johnson has long been in his grave, so he couldn't care less anyway. It's well written and definitely a page turner, but I can't mark this book as something that "I loved" or even "liked" because I didn't. I endured it. Apr 20, Francesca rated it it was amazing Shelves: i-own-a-copy , horror , reading-challenge , fiction , paperback-owned , topages , male-authors , 5-star-reads.
Is there anything more scary than evil children? Maybe, but not in my opinion. Children are supposed to be the epitome of innocence and everything that's good in the world so when they do something horrific and psychotic that is something that I just can't comprehend. I know it happens. I know children like that exist, but it's a thought that I usually try to push out of my mind.
A book like this shoves it right back. Do I believe that all children are like the ones depicted in this book? Do Is there anything more scary than evil children? Do I think that all children are capable of these acts? Well, capable, maybe but definitely not willing to do them. I don't think most children would decide to do the things these children did, but I can't deny that there are some that would and as an optimist who firmly believes that there is more good in the world then bad, that is a hard thing to admit.
There was a case I read about a few years ago, which is quite a well known case in England, which disturbed me and has stayed with me. It was the case of James Bulger. If you don't know that case, first of all, lucky you! Secondly, I'm not going to explain it here as I find it horrific but feel free to look it up. That case was a prime example of what this book portrays. I didn't enjoy either. I can say right now, that I will never read either again.
They are not favourites of mine and I didn't love them. They are tough to read and definitely not for everybody but they earned 5 stars each for making me feel so strongly and for just how well they were written and portrayed. That's not to say the books are alike. I've seen comparisons and while I can understand some similarities and I understand that they were both based off the same real life case, there are some major differences.
First of all, TGND is closer to the real story. TGND also had the children being lead and corrupted by an adult figure. In this book, however, the children are acting completely on their own accord. TGND started slowly and eased into the tension and then gradually unveiled the horror. This book jumps straight in. There's a small prologue and then bam! Barbara is tied to the bed that's not a spoiler, it's in the book description and it is the basic premise.
However, once set up it is a tense ride. There isn't non-stop, graphic, torture, in fact, most of the actual torture is very few and far between. The real torture is the waiting. Just as it is for Barbara. The waiting for what's going to come next, the waiting to see how far the kids will take it, the waiting to see how long Barbara has to endure being tied up, waiting to see how they'll next take away some more of her dignity.
It's tense and intense. It's genuinely terrifying. The 5 children are genuinely terrifying. They have no empathy. Feel no guilt except Bobby but it's impossible to feel sorry for him when he started it all. They take pleasure in it. All of it. We get each characters POV and it makes it all the more disturbing. Seeing each child's reasoning with what they're doing. Seeing what they think and how they feel about it. Barbara's POV is tough to take.
We join her in her descent from initial confusion to denial to realisation to terror. The only times I found Barbara a bit frustrating was when she kept blaming herself for everything but then maybe that's a natural reaction. Her thought process was there too. We had insight into the minds of the captors and the captive, and neither was easy to take in. The book was hard to put down while simultaneously hard to carry on with and the ending left me reeling. I both highly recommend it and also don't because it's a truly excellent piece of horror fiction which has been severely overlooked but it is also not something that I think most people will be able to stomach.
It definitely deserves 5 stars and I can definitely say that I will not be forgetting about this book. Not what I expected to be honest, but I was still suitably disturbed and unsettled by the end.
Jun 15, Amanda Lyons rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites. Let's Go Play at the Adams' is a book that is dark, cold, and yet infinitely readable.
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