Power in the words.

40 years ago, a young girl's body was found tortured to death in a home in Indianapolis. Her name was Sylvia Marie Likens.

24 years later, Jack Ketchum would write The Girl Next Door, a fictionalized version of what happened to Sylvia.

It's 1950s America. Baseball, hotdogs and apple pie.

David is catching crawfish down by the creek when he meets Meg, and is quickly smitten by her. Turns out she and her sister have moved right next door to David.

Meg and her sister Susan have lost their parents in a car crash and are now living with Ruth and her three boys. But something is wrong with Ruth. Real wrong.

She seems to be losing her mind.

And Meg is Ruth's target on her decent into madness.

I don't even know where to start. This book is probably the most emotionally draining books I have ever read. Admittedly, parts of JF Gonzalez's Survivor were hard to read because they were so brutal, but that was only parts. And Survivor hurt me.

But Girl didn't just hurt me, it beat the shit out of me. Relentlessly. Everytime I thought it was done kicking my ass, it would blindside me again with another punch to the head. It hurt me to read it. I didn't want to see what else this girl had to go through.

And I could not put it down.

That's the worse part. I could not put the book down. I felt dirty after reading it--like I watched a crime and did nothing to stop it. That's how good this book is. You want to stop reading, you need to stop reading, you beg yourself to put the book down, throw it away, burn it. Anything. Just make it stop. But you can't.

There is so much power in the words of The Girl Next Door, you can almost feel it because it radiates off every single page.

Read it.

Decisions, decisions.

Okay, so I fucked up.

I didn't have The Killing Floor, so I went ahead and read Lee Child's Die Trying.

As far as bad-assedness, Reacher was all about it in this one.

The book opens with Reacher being in the wrong place at the wrong time and he ends up getting kidnapped with an FBI agent.

Shoved in the back of a car, then the back of a truck, the kidnappers take Reacher and the agent on a cross-country journey to hell.

Good stuff.

Now, as far as who is the bigger bad ass, Pike or Reacher? I gotta tell you, this was neck and neck almost all the way until the end, until Reacher cried.

Yeah, this one is going to be a no brainer.

Advantage - Pike.

However, Reacher's blubbering didn't stop me from starting Without Fail. Yeah, I'm reading these all out of order. I'll regret it later, but right now I don't care.

Joe Pike or Jack Reacher?

On the suggestion of a friend, I finally got around to reading a Jack Reacher novel, Running Blind.

My buddy Aric claims that Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a bigger hardass than Robert Crais' Joe Pike (of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike fame).

I'm not buying it.

Yet.

Now, granted, Running Blind is a helluva novel, and Jack Reacher is certainly a man not to be fucked with, but Pike's fury is a quiet one, thus more intimidating.

But, I won't just hand it over to Pike. After Blind, I'm going to read Killing Floor (which I should have read first, as it's the first novel, but like a dumbass I didn't bother to check before I started Blind) and then, probably, move on to Die Trying, the second Reacher novel.

However, Round 1 goes to Joe Pike.