YMMV / Playground

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Extremely violent Saw style death traps with children as the victims. This, for obvious reasons, highly offends most people. For example, Goodreads has a large number of reviews that openly admit they haven't read it, they are just disgusted the book exists at all and so are rating it 1-star. Some even get so mad by the very concept their review is literally just insults directed at the author.
• Bile Fascination: Much of the book’s notoriety on the internet comes from morbidly curious readers wanting to see just how far the extreme violence and depravity goes, with many tapping out after the infamous page 40.
• Complete Monster: Geraldine Borden is a rich and elderly narcissist, who loves to cause misery just because. Gaining lust towards her own mother and causing her death when trying to have sex with her, Geraldine adopted Rock Stanley, and proceeded to physically and mentally abuse him for decades, branding his chest to mark him as her as she rapes him regularly. Spiteful over not being able to conceive a daughter to project her sexual fantasies onto, Geraldine works with Dr. Fuchs and forces Rock to help as they construct a torture chamber based on a playground, using Rock to lure children in to force them into being brutally killed in these chambers. After Rock manages to lure three families in with promise of money, Geraldine traps the parents as she forces 8 children into the torture den, forcing them through dangerous and deadly playground themed torture devices, while forcing the parents to watch their children die. A sadist who sees the world as beneath her, Geraldine causes the death of six of the children and attempts to murder Rock when he frees the remaining parents and kids, declaring him a failure who belongs to her only.
• Watch It for the Meme: Playground became rather popular on book TikTok due to the extreme and shocking plot. This led to many people being "challenged" to read it for shock value and make a video about being disgusted, or just to understand all the memes.

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