In a few key scenes, such as when the increasingly guilt-stricken Bobby argues against the group’s final plan, the author breaks the spell by digressing into a snoozy civics lesson. Cover artwork by: Dan Rempel A beautiful book with printed endpapers and paste-downs, full-color frontispiece and illustrations and with marking ribbon etc. Johnson tries to justify it by making it a daring extension of their outdoor army games, yet it remains a stretch. Johnson’s LET’S GO PLAY AT THE ADAMS’ (1974), a vintage shocker newly reissued in mass market paperback. Still, a bummer babysitter, slightly older, less fun and more restrictive, would have enhanced the story’s believability as well as ratcheted up its kids-versus-adults dynamic.

Let s Go Play at the Adams - AbeBooks

Indeed, due to scenes of youth-administered brutality and for having been so long out of print, LET’S GO PLAY has acquired an unholy contraband mystique. This is an impressively serious and richly detailed work—a parable of adolescent savagery drenched in sweaty late-summer atmospherics. The reputation isn’t unjustified; the scene described above isn’t the novel’s most disturbing, or even a strong contender.When Johnson strays into philosophizing narrator territory, the result is sometimes effective, sometimes not.

Go Play at the Adams’ (Paperbacks from Hell) Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ (Paperbacks from Hell)

Horror fans owe Hendrix and Valancourt a debt of gratitude for resurrecting this brutal lost classic. Granted, Barbara’s sheer likeability is in one way a useful choice; it makes their escalating disregard for her even creepier.Or to see Barbara, naked and traumatized, through the perspective of not one, not two, but three different teenage male gazes? But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.

BOOK REVIEW: “LET’S GO PLAY AT THE ADAMS’” IS A BRUTAL LOST

Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away.

Unclipped dust jacket has light general wear including some sunning and edge wear, faint impressions of scratches. Barbara, a twenty-year-old college student, fun and friendly, and only mildly disciplining, isn’t an especially plausible kidnapping target. LET’S GO PLAY AT THE ADAMS’ is part of Valancourt’s reissue of various titles discussed in the excellent PAPERBACKS FROM HELL (2017), Grady Hendrix’s book about the paperback horror market of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Barbara is minimally cared for by the five children; their objective, initially, is simply to do away with all adult supervision. Soon, however, John and Paul, the neighbor boys, strongly abetted by Paul’s sister Dianne, push for further victimization.