Book Review: Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal W. Johnson (1974)

The 2020 reissue paperback of Let's Go Play at the Adams', by Mendal W. Johnson. (First published in 1974)

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is a 1974 horror novel by Mendal W. Johnson that has become a notorious cult book due to its’ shocking subject matter. After languishing out of print for decades, and commanding exorbitant prices on the used book market, the novel was finally reprinted in paperback in 2020 as part of Grady Hendrix’s “Paperbacks from Hell” series. The premise of the book is this: Barbara, a 20-year-old who is nannying for two children, ages 13 and 10, while their parents vacation in Europe, awakens one morning to find that she is tied to the bed and gagged. It quickly becomes clear that the children have made Barbara their prisoner in order to be free from adult supervision. The children have three older teenage neighbor friends that they typically spend their days with. Calling themselves “Freedom Five,” they have devised an elaborate plan to keep Barbara prisoner. 

 From the beginning, the children face a dilemma. They have caught a tiger by the tail. If they let Barbara go, they face certain punishment. (Although it seems clear Barbara is not a vengeful tiger.) If they keep Barbara prisoner, they avoid punishment for the moment, but their punishment may grow worse the longer Barbara is held prisoner.  

In the hands of a lesser talent, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ could easily be just schlocky torture porn. But I think Johnson had higher aspirations in mind. Johnson convincingly enters into the minds of all of his characters-the five children and Barbara-no small feat for a novelist.  

I wonder if Johnson was familiar with books about the Holocaust? I bring this up because he seems interested in the psychology of why seemingly normal people would do bad things. I would suspect that Johnson knew of the Milgram experiments and the Stanford prison experiment—two notorious psychology experiments that demonstrated how “normal” people were capable of inflicting pain on others if they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. This is an underlying theme of the novel—because Barbara has become the children’s prisoner, they begin to treat her as a prisoner, not as a human being.  

Similar to the comic strip Dick Tracy, the novel shows how wrong compounds wrong. You do one wrong thing, and then suddenly you’re doing 5 more wrong things in order to cover up the first wrong thing you did. You sense the claustrophobic choices the characters face. (Or imagine they face, as they try to justify their actions and prevent anyone from learning about the first wrong thing.)  

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ was Mendal W. Johnson’s only published novel, and he died just two years after the book’s publication. The introduction tells us that Johnson wrote several other unpublished novels. I’m curious as to what Johnson’s other novels are like—are they also thrillers/horror books?  

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ was a difficult book to read, and it’s meant to be. If you read it calmly with a tranquil mind, I’d be worried.