Lydia Danse is a devoted wife, with a wonderful son to raise and nurture. But now her family is being torn apart by a vicious man submerged in his own insanity: her husband. She will do anything to get her son away from him. But Arthur Danse is not a man who surrenders his possessions. He holds on tight to what is his. And he never lets go…
| Publisher | Berkley |
|---|---|
| Year | 1995 |
| Format | Mass-Market Paperback |
| Pages | 247 |
| Country | USA |
| ISBN | 0-425-14946-3 |
Greek edition of The Girl Next Door, translated by Nick Roussos.
(Nick Roussos later did a revised translation in 2011).
Japanese edition of Road Kill / Joyride, translated by Yoshiki Arisawa.
Japanese edition of The Girl Next Door, translated by Hiroshi Kaneko.
Italian edition of Joyride translated by Annabella Caminiti
The Suburbs.
A contented time in a quiet place for most.
But not for all.
For on a tranquil, tree-lined street, in a dark basement, fourteen-year-old Meg and her little sister Susan are about to learn everything there is to know about the savagery in the human heart.
And an entire neighborhood, young and old alike, will either turn away from the madness, or succumb to it, joining in the slow, sadistic torture of a victim too beautiful and too innocent for her own good. Here, only one young boy will dare to reach out to make an agonizing choice between love and compassion – and violence and evil.
This edition is slightly different than the original American edition, but not as complete as The Unexpurgated Edition.
From the Afterword to The Unexpurgated Edition (edited to avoid possible spoilers):
“There was one…change I made…for the British paperback.
At the very end of the original, [a character is] in the ambulance, shot up with painkillers and speculating through her haze on whether these people who are treating her are paramedics or doctors. She hoped they were doctors, reads the line.
A few months after the book was published I got a letter from a fan who said he’d enjoyed the read immensely. Until he got to that line.
He went on to say that he was in fact a paramedic and in [her] situation, she’d be far better off in the hands of a trained ambulance crew than with a bunch of doctors. I checked it out and he was right of course. Whoops. I hadn’t done my homework. I wrote back and apologized and thanked him for bringing the error to my attention and promised that if the book ever went into another printing anywhere I’d fix it.
In ’95 the Brits at Headline came along and I did.“
