He quotes several contemporary reviews and ponders why there remains a fascination with the book, even though the author only published the one and has been long dead.

For me, it was an edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller that really wormed its way into my brain. When asked why they can’t just stop, they still give childish justifications like “we’re playing a game and you lost,” or “we just can’t, that’s all, we all voted.A sweet, innocent kid, pushed along by the desire to see how far the game can be taken, but also by the fear of what will happen if they get caught. Instead of the backdrop of Vietnam, the sequel is set twenty years later at the time of the Gulf War. Forgetting this, then, is the mistake made by Barbara, a college girl hired to care for the young Adams children in their home along a river in rural New England. Cindy doesn’t feature in the novel an awful lot, but when she does she’s simply a bored young girl who doesn’t fully understand the reality of what’s happening. I don't think most children would decide to do the things these children did, but I can't deny that there are some that would (and as an optimist who firmly believes that there is more good in the world then bad, that is a hard thing to admit).

The Third Reich isn't necessary; as far as I can reconstruct it, I figured I knew kids who would be torturing their babysitter to death if they were reasonably sure they could get away with it. As a whole, many adults truly overlook a child's capacity to understand and interpret the world around them, and in doing so, tend to belittle and diminish that individual view without realizing it. The premise sounded fun and, as someone who has a high tolerance for bad subject matter, I wasn't worried about the content warnings. Reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies, a lost treasure in transgressional fiction, this is a terrifying tale of the evil that lurks inside curious and innocent minds when faced with opportunity devoid of all consequences and barriers. As I mentioned before, there isn’t a huge amount of “on screen” torture and violence, but when it is there, it’s grotesque and nightmarish.Children are supposed to be the epitome of innocence and everything that's good in the world so when they do something horrific and psychotic that is something that I just can't comprehend. Who knows, but this WASP horror novel about nice suburban kids torturing their babysitter is an experience that sticks with you, for better or worse. Dianne does, at one point, grab and twist one of Barbara’s breasts, but up until then, Johnson has downplayed those scenes to a degree.

But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. It stands as a strange and utterly true testament to the uniquely separate mind children have from adults and the dark nature we so quickly forget when we grow out of it. It is one of those books that I thought was very good, but I do not take pleasure in recommending it to others in case it makes them feel how I did as a young girl. 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. Barbara the kindly, loving babysitter wakes up to find herself drugged, gagged and tied up to the bed, one of her charge on a chair in the corner.He is instantly attracted to Barbara and determines that she can become his ‘practice’ girlfriend so that he won’t be embarrassed or ashamed when he gets a real girlfriend. An interesting note I’ll add here instead of further on, in the Further Reading section – from the link I’ll provide, it appears as though Mr Johnson detested children (though he himself had two daughters from his first marriage) which adds further intrigue to the basis of this story using children as the main characters. I’m not sure if it was the expectations of holding this paperback in my hands or what it was, but I found the book to be thoroughly engrossing. Barbara has, and I’d think that someone in her position would be a bit more savage and desperate than she was.