Living Dead Girl, by Elizabeth Scott
Scott, Elizabeth (2008). Living Dead Girl. NY: Simon Pulse. 170 pages.
Alice is fifteen years old and has been imprisoned and abused by Ray since he kidnapped her during a class trip when she was ten. Manipulated physically and mentally until she becomes Ray’s willing little girl, Alice knows that her inevitable growth and maturity–even as Ray tries to halt it by keeping her to a strict diet and waxing routine–will lead to her death. Ray has told her that there was another before Alice; this girl had been murdered at age fifteen. When Ray suggests that Alice can save her own life by helping Ray find a new little girl and that the three of them can live together, Alice sees this as her only opportunity to escape, if not literally, then at least from her role in Ray’s family as “his” girl.
Told in spare and near-poetic prose, Scott’s novel has been described as harrowing and horrific. Alice suffers terribly from sexual abuse; however, scenes of this abuse are included, they are not pruriently descriptive. Most shocking is probably Alice’s willingness to participate in Ray’s plan to find and “train” a new girl because then “she will get his love and I will hold her down to take it all because then there will be none for me” (Scott, 2008, 73).
The most obvious progenitors of this novel are Ouida Sebestyn’s The Girl in the Box (1988) and Catherine Atkins’ When Jeff Comes Home (1999). All three challenge two major children’s literary tropes: that bad things happen to bad people and that good people can retain their essential goodness even under the most extreme and damaging circumstances. As the novel drew closer to its end, I wondered how it could possibly conclude; however, Scott’s conclusion (not resolution) is one that is inevitable given Scott’s realistic (and I’m talking literary realism here, not necessarily mimesis, though this might be a characteristic of the novel as well) agenda.
In spite of the fact that the next clause will probably brand me a major freak, I have to say: I enjoyed this book. This is not to say that I took pleasure in reading about the difficult circumstances of the character; however, it is to say that the narrative tension and the unendingly bleak voice of the narrator were stirringly affective. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from reading a taut and tension-filled novel, just as there is–and here’s the freaky part–a certain satisfaction that comes from reading about something that, as Chris Crutcher writes in the copy on the novel’s back jacket, “none of [the book's] readers will have . . . experienc[ed].” Additionally, there’s a certain masochistic impulse that comes with reading a novel that blames its readers, in a way, for watching victimization and judging the way the audiences of the talk shows Alice watches judges victims like Alice: “You Should Have Done Something,” the audiences crow in Alice’s story.