Chinese edition of The Girl Next Door, translated by Ke Qingxin.
| Publisher | Xiaoyi Publishing |
|---|---|
| Year | 2010 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Pages | 341 |
| Country | China |
| ISBN | 978-986-845699-0 |
A beautiful New York editor retreats to a quiet Maine beach town –
Nearby, a savage human family lurks in the woods, watching, waiting…
And before too many hours pass, five civilized, sophisticated people will learn just how primitive we all are, and that there are no limits to the will to survive.
Released as Joyride in the United States.
Wayne keeps a record of offences. The kids who trash his fence, the dog that dumps in his yard, the guys who give him stress in the bar – they’re all in his book. He hasn’t hit back yet, though the urge is strong. He’ll give in one day. He wonders why he hasn’t dared. So far.
Carole doesn’t want to do it but murder seems like the only solution. The only way to solve the problem of her ex – drunken, sadistic, clever. If the courts can’t protect her and the police can’t keep him away, how else will she ever be free?
On the sunny mountainside, above the creek, that’s where Carole has the courage to solve her problem. Her lover, Lee, has the baseball bat but she’s the one with the rock – and the nerve and desperation to crush a man’s skull and pitch him off a mountain.
Wayne sees it all. Every moment. It’s the very best day of his life. Because it points the way down the road for him. The killing road. And the way he plans it, he and Carole and Lee are all going to do a little traveling together…
A stranger walks into a place of business…and starts shooting.
Three of horror’s most terrifying authors challenged each other to write a novella beginning with that simple idea. But where they each went from there would be limited only by their own powerful imaginations. The results are incredibly varied, totally individual, and relentlessly horrifying. Prepare yourself for three very different visions of fear, each written specifically for this anthology and available nowhere else.
Contents:
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.“
