Jack Ketchum is often mentioned when the topic of “most extreme horror writer” is breached, and it’s not hard to see why when you read The Girl Next Door.

The book details the abuse of a teenage girl by her aunt, who enlists neighborhood children to help torture the girl over the course of a summer. The kids gradually go along with the insane aunt, who moves from abuse to outright torture and eventually murder.

This is a very twisted tale that leaves you feeling ill until you find out the story is based on the real-life murder of Sylvia Likens, who was left with her aunt by her parents and then really was tortured to death by her aunt and neighborhood children. Then you feel really sick.

But then, to add insult to injury, you learn that her aunt (Gertrude Baniszewski) was convicted of murder, but was released on parole after serving 18 years, saying at her parole hearing “I’m not sure what role I had in it … because I was on drugs. I never really knew her … I take full responsibility for whatever happened to Sylvia.”

What happened to Sylvia was that she was raped with a Coke bottle while having “I’m a prostitute and proud of it” burned into her stomach with a boiling hot sewing needle before being bludgeoned to death, following months of other torture. This wasn’t enough to deny Baniszewski parole though. She lived the last five years of her life a free woman, dying of lung cancer at the age of 60.

Once you read the book and then learn all of the above you pretty much lose all faith in humanity. The horrid nature of Ketchum’s book combined with the real-life events it was based on easily makes The Girl Next Door, for us at least, the most disturbing book of all time.