Cw: non-graphic descriptions of extreme violence against children. I’m also going to say some controversial things, so strap in.
I saw a video recently cataloging some of the most disturbing books anyone had ever written. The author had read them all, at least in part. I’m rarely disturbed by books, even ones that others describe as pretty disturbing, so I decided to read the highest-ranked one that had an actual plot—instead of just being lurid descriptions of brutal torment. I read it in one sitting, between midnight and 4:30 am.
Shockingly, the rumored second most disturbing book ever written turned out to be pretty disturbing. But it wasn’t only disturbing because of the horrible things described in the book. The main reason it was disturbing was that it provided a peek into the human propensity for evil, showing how humans do such horrible things. It was based on a true story.
The video I watched was titled ▶i read the 10 most disturbing books ever written. Topping the list was the Marquis De Sade’s book * The 120 Days of Sodom*. Apparently the book doesn’t have much of a plot beyond just being descriptions of terrible and disgusting things happening. Didn’t seem very interesting! So I decided to read #2 on the list—Jack Ketchum’s
The plot of *The Girl Next Door *is that a girl named Meg and her sister Susan move in across the street from the main character, David. Meg’s parents were killed in a car accident, so she was taken in by her aunt Ruth. Ruth begins abusing the two daughters, especially Meg, in ways that grow increasingly extreme—culminating in brutal torture and sexual assault.
Ruth’s two children join in at various points. The main character, David, is good friends with one of Ruth’s children. He learns about the torment, but doesn’t do anything for the vast majority of the book, even though he takes a liking to Meg. Somehow, he manages to tell himself that what’s happening isn’t so bad, even as a girl is chained in a bunker and being tortured.
The book is a very depressing read. It’s mostly about horrible things happening to sympathetic children. You hope it will stop. It doesn’t. What’s worse, it’s psychologically believable because we know something very much like it happened. The story is based on the real-life murder of Sylvia Likens, who was tortured, starved, and murdered by her caregiver Gertrude Baniszewski, Baniszewski’s children, and various neighborhood friends.
The events in The Girl Next Door are disturbing beyond measure. The book opens “You think you know about pain?” It then goes on to detail events that are painful beyond measure—the kind of torments that make their victims wish for death, raw agony in degrees that the human mind isn’t meant to comprehend. Yet it is more disturbing to know that something like it happened. And it is still more disturbing that as it is occurring, you can see *how *a thing like this can happen.
There were two main features that allowed the crimes described in the story to go on as they did without the perpetrators being ratted out. The first was acceptance from a position of authority. Ruth, the woman directing the torture, was a well-liked figure of authority. She was the cool Mom who let the neighborhood children drink beers. And we know from the Milgram experiment that most people are willing to torture an innocent person because they’re instructed to by an authoritative man in a white lab coat.
The second feature was gradualness. The abuse slowly escalated. Each crime inflicted on Meg was a lot like the things previously done to her. Those who had been complicit in the previous crimes couldn’t well claim that, though their previous actions were justified, this one was different. This feature was also present at Milgram. The electric shocks increased gradually. Had they gone up from 0 to 450, likely most people would have stopped. But they increased so gradually that in the minds of the perpetrators, none seemed to make the decisive moral difference.
When both gradualness and social approval are present, there is almost no limit to the horribleness of the things that many people will do. Look at the Nazi officers as they took their victims into gas chambers, often without feeling much guilt. Look at the rest of the world as it remained silent, complicit. Look at Rwanda, where children were hacked to death with machetes, women died of HIV contracted through rape, and the world sat around doing nothing.
Look at the standard practice among people of spending money on luxuries, even as children die—children whose deaths we could have prevented. We make excuses for it. Most people think you can save lives for just about $100, yet never bother doing this at any point in their lives (the real number is $4,000). Even as people in far-away lands suffer and die horribly, very few people bother doing anything about it. Suffering akin to that experienced by Meg in fiction and Likens in reality is seen as a cause for solemnity and lamentation—not for action.
Some disturbing books are just shocking. They tell you nothing about the world beyond the fact that the author had a lot of disturbing ideas (shocking to learn that the Marquis de Sade, from whom the term “sadism” originated, was a nasty guy). But the books that are disturbing in ways that make you think tend to stay with you for longer, and aren’t just a complete waste. Insofar as a book gives you some insight into how evil occurs—how it is that humans rape each other and hack each other to death with machetes in military conflict—then it is not a waste, even if it is unpleasant to read.
These kinds of books are at their best when they expose you to the blackness in your own heart, the evil that you are capable of in the right settings. It is very easy to look at atrocities and judge others. The harder thing to do is to recognize it in yourself. While perhaps you wouldn’t have done that, you would, in the right settings, do other evil things.
It is very easy to recognize ways that others are bad. It is hard to recognize the ways that you are.
Oh and one last notable feature about the situation, if you’ll permit me a moment on my soapbox, is its resemblance to factory farming. Every one of the abuses Meg suffered—starvation, sexual assault, branding with a hot iron, scalding with boiling water, and forced confinement—is ubiquitous throughout the meat industry, inflicted on beings with minds like primitive humans. That’s not because Ketchum aimed to teach a lesson about factory farming. It is just because all the cruelest, most wicked tortures that humans have dreamed up are widespread in factory farms.
So when you read a disturbing account of someone innocent being locked in a dark torture dungeon and think “I would never be complicit in this kind of thing,” just know that you are each time you purchase animal products. Know additionally that it costs about ten cents to spare an animal from a year in a cage. Probably knowing those things won’t change your behavior in any way, because you are more like Meg’s torturers than you’d like to think. As am I, as is your brother, as is everyone. There is a monster inside us all.
Of course, you’ll tell yourself that it’s different.
You’ll say that the pus-filled wounds that result from prolonged contact with the feces they must lie in all day, barely able to walk, are categorically different from Meg’s wounds. That the creatures we torture aren’t our species, cannot talk, cannot understand, and that of course you condemn factory farming (though you pay for it). Not clear that those make much difference to the badness of being burned with an iron. Meg’s torturers had their own excuses too. But at the end of the day, after all those excuses, there is just an innocent being facing extreme violence in some dark dungeon, branded with a hot iron, starved, and beaten; a crowd of complicit humans who tell themselves that what they’re doing is okay because they enjoy what they do; and terrible, terrible pain.
