Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

It’s All Fun and Games Until…

The only book written by Mendal W. Johnson, who died two years after it was published, 1974’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ still elicits passionate loathing. Search online and you’ll find readers who describe destroying the book after finishing it, who write about being left ill, about how sick the author must have been. They call it “misogynistic” and “loathsome.” Yet people remember it vividly decades later. It’s been published from Australia to Turkey and has inspired two self-published sequels (both available online). The book has serious flaws, but it also sticks with you.

Summer in Maryland. Barbara is 20 years old and she’s come to babysit for the Adams children—Bobby, age 12, and his sister Cindy, age 10—while their parents are in Europe for two weeks. Neighborhood kids stop by and go swimming and everything feels like a dream. Then Barbara is chloroformed and wakes up tied to the bed. The neighbors, Dianne (age 17), Paul (age 13), and John (age 16), have decided it would be funny to play games with the babysitter.

Days pass and Barbara is kept bound. Gradually the kids begin to do things to her. As Cindy giggles, “Paul likes girls’ feet…He’s the best at torturing.” Barbara’s confinement reduces her to her essential self. She’s horrified that people she thought were her friends have “no ability or desire to project themselves into her situation or imagine how much she hurt.” They treat her like a Barbie doll, and we all know what kids eventually do to their Barbie dolls.

The torture gets worse, and it ends exactly where you’re dreading it will, but the sleaziness one would expect isn’t there. Instead, the conclusion is suffused with an existential grief. Why the kids do this, no one knows. The closest we come to an answer is when Dianne screams at Barbara, “Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose.” Barbara demands to know what game they’re playing. “The one everyone plays…The game of who wins the game,” Diane answers.

Credit 44

A completely nihilistic vision of the world, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ doesn’t deny the possibility of goodness, or beauty, or grace. It merely points out that those are the things we kill first. As Johnson writes in his final, lyrical chapter: “Goodness, go out of the world.”

Credit 45

Credit 46