Sheryl Friedlander, writing for The Tampa Tribune, compared the novel favorably to The Collector and Lord of the Flies, praising its "style and flow of thought" as "smooth and interesting. You take all that and make it vulnerable to the psychology of pack mentality, and some horrible things can happen. We find out he is sports driven, wanting to make the football team this next school year and that he feels a lot of lust towards women but doesn’t know how to process it completely. Malcolm, his wife Sam and their two kids have been staying at the same cabin, at the same campground for years now.

Take Barbara's unwanted physical response, lingering hope of an escape, awareness that this will be her last time, and throw them all together, and you get an encounter that even she doesn't fully know how to feel about. Never had I before read something with this intense of content and had so much trouble staying awake, like Droopy Dog with sleep apnea. 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.only one of them is characterized as having mental issues; none have traumatic backgrounds or guidance from a disturbed adult. Barbara is intelligent, but between her decision to continue trying to appeal to the humanity of her captors (whom she thinks of as “just children”) and her reluctance to hurt children even when they’re torturing her, she ends up in worse and worse positions.

not context that excuses those things, but context that allows an understanding of why they occurred. The author is very good at getting into all the character's minds and succeeds in giving a good psychological portrayal of each of the protagonists in this, at times, quite harrowing, but no less enjoyable, story. A lot of people’s reviews mentioned how the characters in this weren’t believable, but I think otherwise. The story is not as gory as I thought it would be (which is fine for me as I'm not really a gorehound).Because this book has developed a bit of a cult-like status amongst horror aficionados, I’ve decided to delve deeper into this tale than I normally do with reviews.

Released in 1989 as a novel and then in 2007 as a movie, the book used the Likens story as its backdrop. There hasn’t been anything specific to link the case directly with the story, other than the same use of one of the children, and the similarity of a young female being imprisoned before being killed. One quick thing to say about the writing is that it really would have been nice to have more paragraph breaks! 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. And so we are left with incredibly long chapters of pure cruelty and torture of a helpless woman with nothing to induce empathy or horror in the witnessing reader.And Barbara’s reactions to the methods of mistreatment seemed a bit ‘off’ and not nearly as soul-destroying as they should have been. instead their works have an almost ironic distance from the material that encourages contemplation of - rather than engulfment by - that material. As Matt Hayward tweeted recently; “Bad people doing and saying bad things in books is not an endorsement of those bad things. I can really only explain it (without spoilers) as taking a trip in the mind of each characters down a very dark path to which they all seem to be inevitably locked.