Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door

In the placid suburban summer of 1958, 12 year old David pals around with the three boys next door, enjoying typical prepubescent activities like catching crawfish, playing hide and seek and teasing the local girls. That is, until the boys’ beautiful teenage cousin and her younger invalid sister come to live with them after being recently orphaned in a horrible car crash. As David befriends the older of the two girls and starts to feel the pangs of first love, he begins to notice that the girls’ presence in the house next door seems to elicit inexplicable jealousy and resentment on the part of the boys’ mother Ruth, a crass single woman that all the kids in the neighbourhood look up to. As Ruth’s hostility towards her two charges escalates into open verbal and physical abuse, she finds willing accomplices in the local children, who are eager participants in the girls’ humiliation in exchange for peer approval and the clandestine privilege of drinking the beer Ruth routinely plies them with. As the situation gets more sordid and evolves into a gruesome routine of group torture, David is forced to join in or find himself the next target for this sexually-fuelled aggression.