Search/Recent Changes
DBTropes
...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!

Let's Go Play at the Adams'

 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
type
 TVTItem
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
label
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
page
 LetsGoPlayAtTheAdams
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
comment
 "A novel of lingering horror."That describes it aptly.Published in 1974 by author Mendal Johnson, Let's Go Play at the Adams' is the grim story of Barbara, a 20-year-old babysitter who agrees to take care of a pair of preteen children while their parents go on extended vacation for the summer. But Barbara wakes up to find herself tightly tied to a bed and gagged, with the faces of her charges—and three of their neighbor friends—grinning down at her. The kids are in charge now, and they have no intent of letting Barbara loose. Except now that they have her captive, they're not sure what they should do with her.After all, if you have someone tied up and at your mercy, you have to do something with them.Right?What could have been a childish prank spirals into a nightmarish meditation on the ethics of power. The children know they could easily let Barbara go at any time...but then they'll get in trouble. But if they don't let her go, they will ultimately get into even more trouble once the adults return. Gradually their excitement over having a captive turns into resentment as they come to understand that Barbara, through her very helplessness, has trapped them in an inexorable chain of events they are now forced to bring to the only possible conclusion. She was supposed to be powerless. Now the very fact that she is their prisoner has exerted an even greater power over them all. And that wasn't part of the plan.But Barbara is still tied up, helpless, and terrified. They can make her pay for what she's making them do to her.Yes, this is a real novel. Some reviews on Amazon.com are from people who say that they've thrown the book away in disgust or even destroyed it after having read it, and one person admitted to burning it! Another reader praised the book for its realistic portrayal of helplessness, and showing how one's thoughts would actually wander and what they'd wander to, what one would think and feel, when they're tied up and perpetually helpless. There's a tremendous amount of description in this story, and we get inside the heads of not only Barbara, but each of her captors, each of whom is getting something different out of the situation, each of whom has a different view of it, and all of whom, over time, begin to care less and less about Barbara.The book itself has a grim backstory: based on the murder of Sylvia Likens (which also inspired An American Crime and The Girl Next Door), and intended as an unflinching look into the nature of human cruelty, the dark material and the questions it raised eventually led the author, a recovering alcoholic, to resume drinking, resulting in his early death from cirrhosis of the liver less than two years after the novel's publication and giving the book a singular reputation as the novel that killed its own author.The book attracted the attention of TV editor, Barry Schneebeli, who wrote a sequel called Game's End. Due to copyright laws, it was never actually published, but was available online at his website (the website domain has since expired and the Wayback Machine didn't save the DOC files). You can find a review here). 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 2019, 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.A sequel In Name Only , Lets Go Play At The Adams 2 aka Visiting the Adams, written and apparently self-published by Peter Francis, can be found on Kindle Unlimited. Instead of the backdrop of Vietnam, the sequel is set twenty years later at the time of the Gulf War. Its author claims to have followed "links" left by Mendal Johnson about the Sylvia Likens case.Let's Go Play at the Adams' contains examples of:
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
fetched
 2024-02-04T12:15:48Z
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
parsed
 2024-02-04T12:15:48Z
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
isPartOf
 DBTropes
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
type
 ItemName
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
comment
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
featureApplicability
 1.0
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
featureConfidence
 1.0
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
hasFeature
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
 Let's Go Play at the Adams' / int_name
itemName
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
hasFeature
 Badly Battered Babysitter / int_6e7e2ee7
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'
hasFeature
 Died Standing Up / int_6e7e2ee7
 Lets Go Play At The Adams
seeAlso
 Let's Go Play at the Adams'