Let's Go Play at the Adams'

by Mendal W. Johnson

“the unbearable tension of a silent scream”

“Somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose.”

“Barbara, the victimized babysitter, represents the American left, the ‘dreaming left’ who is abused and killed. Adults, who have no part in the action of the plot and never know what happened, are the political right. ‘And what’s left,’ the author explained, ‘is the “great silent American majority” that supposedly runs things in its odd and unpredictable fashion,’ the American middle that Mr. Johnson thinks of as the ‘American muddle.’ Mr. Johnson chose children to represent middle America ‘out of purest spite.’ No one wins in the book: the left gets killed, the right gets duped and the middle, he indicates, the children, will eventually crack as they grow up.”

Each person expects to grow up. Ascension to power is a given part of existence. Usually, however, it lies distantly ahead—we shall have power when we have the years, the means and experience, for power—and meanwhile, we shall coast along being simply what we are and no more. Now, of course, all of this was capsized. They had done the unbelievable thing, they had captured a grown-up.

You make yourself be nice, and you think that if you keep on being that way and don’t do anything to the world, it won’t do anything to you.”

Who knows what people think when they’re children and we haven’t broken them yet?

By afterthought Barbara supposed that if it were her destiny to be raped at all (a large if, but there was some measure of fatalism in her nature), then she was fortunate that it had been a boy she knew and not some man animal up an alley or in the woods or wherever.

“Like when we cut off the guy’s fingers so he couldn’t climb out of the well?”

“Killing—is—what—one—person—does—to—another—person—who—can’t—help—himself.”

People in pain live by a different clock, she thought; it never moves.

This is not the end, either. Despite human protest, the end of the end goes on forever.