"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:
- Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: The epilogue never explicitly states, but contemplates the possibility that Barbara's spirit did. While the text specifically uses the word "apotheosis", the picture it paints is a grimmer one of Barbara bound and gagged as she was in her last moments, looking back on her time as a human and at humanity as a whole with deep, tragic knowing.
- Author Appeal: Some people speculate that Johnson was a sadist and the book is nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence. Others say this isn't the case.
- Bondage Is Bad: Yes, the fetish version. Paul is implied to at least have a foot fetish; he may have a bondage fetish, or not. But he is the most messed up of the characters.
- Bound and Gagged: Galore. From beginning to end. Many, many different ways.
- Children Are Innocent: Averted.
- Creepy Child: Paul.
- Damsel in Distress: Barbara is probably the most extreme version of this trope in existence, since she is held captive and imperiled the entire book starting from the very beginning.
- Deconstruction: Pretty much does this to the oft-used comedic plot device of the babysitter being tied up by her charges (I Love Lucy for example). When Barbara is first tied up, it seems like the novel will go in a light-hearted direction. She's more surprised and annoyed, than concerned. That changes in the second or third chapter.
- Died Standing Up: Perhaps the only time this trope has had no connection to Badassery. Barbara, due to how she is tied at the end.
- Downer Ending: The kids get away with it, and a random homeless person is found guilty of their crime.
- Fatal Flaw: Barbara manages to get the upper hand and fight off her captors and nearly forces them to free her... 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.
- Fix Fic: At least two professional works, the above mentioned Game's End by Barry Schneebeli (more on this below), and a subplot in the novel The Abyss by Steve Vance, were born out each writer's desire to save Barbara and/or punish the kids. If you've ever read the book, you might be tempted to write one yourself. No one would blame you.
- Freudian Excuse: Paul
- From Bad to Worse: And worse. And worse. And it never gets better.
- The Hero Dies: Barbara is more of a protagonist than an actual hero, but you get the idea.
- Humiliation Conga: Game's End.
- Karma Houdini: The kids who did all this. Cindy in particular is implied to grow up not only without consequences for her involvement, but never even thinks about what she's done.
- Kids Are Cruel: They're as cruel as they can get here.
- Kill the Cutie: Barbara, who dies at the end of the book.
- "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: The book most certainly doesn't justify it, but played with the second time Barbara is raped by Johnny; as the text states, "it is possible to be made to enjoy." 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.
- Peer Pressure Makes You Evil: Many of these kids, it is implied, wouldn't do things to Barbara on their own. Especially Bobby, whose conscience nags at him much of the time. But as a group, they lose their inhibitions, or go along with what the others are doing.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Bobby, one of the kids Barbara was babysitting.
- Purple Prose: The prose oscillates between flowing, florid descriptions, clinically dispassionate ones, bone-dry commentary, and abrupt, concise summaries. It's a pretty brutally effective combination.
- Rape as Drama: Johnny rapes Barbara.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Johnny's
Moral Event Horizon is that he rapes Barbara. - Ripped from the Headlines: Maybe. Some speculate that it was very loosely inspired by the Sylvia Likens case (which was a tragedy of its own, also involving kids being very cruel to a teen girl, but was of a very different nature than this book). Others say there are more differences than similarities.
- Teens Are Monsters: The premise of the books is teenagers capturing and tormenting an adult.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The epilogue suggests that this is why Barbara died. Barbara's college roommate, ruminating on her death, ultimately concludes there is no place in the world for a person as innocent as Barbara to exist: "Goodness, leave the world so that we can live in it."
- Took a Level in Badass: Barbara almost manages to fight her way to freedom, all while still tied up. The only reason she fails is due to her unwillingness to hurt one of the children.
Game's End contains Examples Of:
- The Atoner: Bobby; this ultimately gets him killed.
- Babies Ever After: In the very last scene, Barbara and Jack are happily married and have children.
- Distant Finale: Barbara's portion of the epilogue.
- Dying as Yourself: Paul. Right before he dies, the cloud of insanity is finally lifted from his mind.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Barbara's physical rescue comes easily enough, but it takes the rest of the book to emotionally overcome what happened to her.
- Fix Fic: Game's End is a particularly high-profile and pointed example of Fix Fic: the injustice of the original ending was so outrageous and overwhelming that a professional author felt compelled to write a novel-length Fix Fic in response to a contemporary author's published work. Moreover, it's hard to express how close Game's End came to being the authorized sequel—even the original author's widow gave her blessings, and many fans consider it canon.
- Heel–Face Turn: Bobby is turned inside-out by guilt and ultimately redeems himself for what many would consider an irredeemable act.
- Humiliation Conga: John; this culminates in him being raped in prison and later committing suicide.
- Karma Houdini: Game's End retcons this trope's occurrence from the first book two ways. First, Barbara is saved at the last moment. Second, most of the book is about the kids answering for their crimes (and the tragedy their parents go through). Played straight with Cindy, though.
- Mentor: Bobby's father, who helps him find the inner strength to testify against the rest of the five in court.
- Redemption Equals Death: In the epilogue, a now-teenaged Bobby dies saving a girl who he thought was drowning. She wasn't really drowning, she thought he was cute and was just trying to get his attention. His father speculates on whether, in his last moments, Bobby finally found the ability to forgive himself.
- Rescue Romance:
- Barbara and Jack, although their relationship takes its sweet time to get to that point.
- In Bobby's portion of the epilogue, a girl attempts to invoke this by pretending to drown; he ends up drowning himself when trying to save her.
