In my office, in the main bookcase, is a shelf reserved for special books: those novels which, for one reason or another, have worked their way into a special part of my life. These are the novels which have burned themselves into my subconscious. Stories which will never leave me. Some of the best friends a writer could ever have.

Some, like Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, have played a significant role in my career as a young writer. Others are there because they will not leave me alone, and I, in turn, will never be able to abandon them. Every year or so I will, when a sudden mood strikes, pick one up, and then I'm doomed. Regardless of deadline pressures or commitments, the outside world melts away as I step into another writer's universe.

For the record, some of those other titles are: King's The Shining and The Stand; Straub's Ghost Story; James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia; Hardy's Tess of The D'Urbervilles and The Return of the Native; Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers; James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss. There are maybe a dozen others.

And then there's The Girl Next Door.

All of the above have, I stress, infected my being as thoroughly as a virus. But none come close to the effect of the book you hold in your hand. If it's a virus, then its name is Ebola-Ketchum.

Highly contagious. Totally deadly.

I survived my encounter with this lethal literary disease, and inevitably, the experience changed me.

From the opening line, You think you know about pain? to the last, I was trapped in a fever dream of such horror, of such empathic torture as I suffered the agonies of Meg Loughlin in the basement of the Chandler house. And I was David, the narrator, a twelve- year-old boy from New Jersey, not a twenty-nine-year-old writer from England. The decades, the locations, may have been years and thousands of miles apart, but that New Jersey neighborhood became my old house, my woods, my streets...

I shook with tension as I turned the pages, skin crawling with dread, for I knew from the moment David meets Megan down by the brook his life -- and mine -- would change. Megan was Kay, whom I worshipped from afar that long, hot English summer in 1976. But that was a pleasant, vital teenage memory, one of longings as fiery and ultimately as dust bowl barren as the heat wave of that year. I knew the ending then as I know the ending now: a broken heart. And from the moment I finished the prologue of The Girl Next Door , I knew what was coming. Slowly, as irrevocably as being dragged naked, screaming over shards of broken glass.

Once he'd cast his spell, Jack Ketchum proceeded to push me into a heart of darkness. A place I know exists and frequently visit, either through my own work or the words of others. But nothing could prepare me for just how dark, or how horrifying this place would be. Perhaps it was knowing that the book was inspired by a real incident. On reflection, in part, yes. But mainly it was due to Ketchum's superb, seductively simple prose, blending eloquence with unflinching every-day matter-of-factness.

When I discover a book that grips me from page one, I'm lost for the next few hours or the rest of the day, or longer if it's a novel like Dan Simmon's hefty Carrion Comfort. In its Warner Books edition, The Girl Next Door runs 232 pages.

A couple of hours, I thought, then I'll get back to the word processor.

It took twenty-four hours.

I read the first eighty pages, going slower than usual, savoring the prose, the imagery, the deft, subtle metaphors. Behind the pleasure of reading something so well written, of course, was the steadily mounting sense of dread.

I took a break. Went for a walk to get some air that chill April Massachusetts morning.

I couldn't shake the book.

A stop at the liquor store. A six-pack of Rolling Rock, cigarettes. Then home.

And the book.

Half an hour and two beers and too many Marlboros later, another break.

The phone rang. I didn't answer. Couldn't talk to anyone right then.

A few more pages, chain-smoking now, the beers almost gone. Shoulders tight with anxiety, stomach churning. Like Megan, I, too, wanted to escape. And couldn't. I was trapped in that goddamn fallout shelter Will Chandler, Sr. had built as a fuck you to Khrushchev.

I was alone in the perpetual blackness of Ruth's evil and didn't know how to get out.

Another walk. A nap. But I couldn't sleep. The book had possessed me.

Read a chapter. Walk away. Return. Read another chapter. It became an obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Finally, my girlfriend came home and distracted me sufficiently to keep the book at bay. We talked about it, how it was upsetting me. It's only a novel, she said.

Yeah, right...

I didn't sleep well that night, and after tossing and turning with David, Susan, Meg, Eddie, Woofer and the others standing in the shadows of our bedroom, I finally got up as dawn's first gleaming touched the curtains.

The last forty pages tore me apart.

Since that first time, I've read The Girl Next Door twice. Or tried to. Even knowing what horrors were to come didn't make it any easier. The third time took three weeks. Even long gaps didn't help, only made it worse, for the characters would linger in my dreams night after night.

This morning, faced with the prospect of this "Afterword", I finally read it in one sitting. It still hurt, for this novel's power does not diminish with time. It grows stronger.

The Girl Next Door is an essential book, a definite must-read, and the pain it causes is, as a Jewish friend would say, a good pain. It is a courageous book.

The fiction I write is very bleak, and the stories I like tend to be the same. Maybe I don't believe in happy endings. Real life seldom has a happy ending, even if we should be so lucky as to die at a ripe old age, asleep in bed, of `natural causes'. For me, exploring the dark side of human existence in fiction is essential, because if we don't explore the darkness how can we define the light?

Jack Ketchum knows the answer to this.

While writing this piece, the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now has been playing quietly in the background. It seems an apt accompaniment, for like Martin Sheen's Captain Willard, I was given an assignment to go up river, to go back into the jungle, the dense foliage that is The Girl Next Door . And as Brando's Colonel Kurtz says to Sheen's Willard during their final encounter, "horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, they are enemies to fear..."

On that book shelf sit several old friends. Among them, never far from the range of my vision, rests The Girl Next Door.

It is a friend in the darkness whose light shines bright.

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Copyright © 1995/2004 by Philip Nutman