Quite a Shock

I had only heard the odd comment here and there of attempts to challenge and ban Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl. When I picked it up a few days ago from the library I had not expected the destitute and graphic narrative within the text that, once I devoured in one sitting last night at 2 am, I swore would give me nightmares.

Once you are pulled into "Alice's" world, a nightmare in which she has spent the last five years living with and being abused by the man who kidnapped her, you wish you'd never been taken there. The brief book is a front row seat into Alice's pain and lack of help from any neighbors or caring strangers to report her captor. You also see into her captor's, Ray's, head about how the cycle of abuse began with his mother and transferred into his serial kidnapping of little girls, threatening to murder their families should they run away, his attempts to preserve their "innocent little girl" image, and his irateness when they start to grow up.

Alice is a hollow shell whose only wish is to be unfeeling and freed from her "living death". I quoted the process of reading this book to someone to day as comparable to scraping open your skin, pouring rubbing alcohol onto it, and then setting it on fire.

My boyfriend calls me crazy for reading this stuff and is very surprised how I'm not depressed by it. I survived reading a collection of Holocaust literature for children and Young Adults last semester and thought I was prepared for anything. I had also read my fair share of sexual abuse and rape books (courtesy of Ellen Hopkins), but nothing prepared me for the waking nightmare that is Living Dead Girl.

I would not recommend it for everyone, especially the faint of heart.

I think by seeing the road where Alice has traveled and escaped from that help can be given to real girls in her situation.