Let's Go Play at the Adams'

""It's only a game...She raised and turned her head and carefully explored her ropes. She tested them again and again, finding first hope and then disappointment in a constant, steady rotation. Straining, her fingers reached for unreachable knots and curled back again. At length, unconvinced but impotent, her inner self desisted." "It's only a game," Barbara, the lovely twenty-year-old babysitter, told herself as she awoke bound and gagged and guarded by solemn thirteen-year-old Bobby. "It's only a game." Bobby and his sister, Cindy, would soon tire of their joke and free her. And even if she couldn't depend on them or their friend Paul, who was clearly unbalanced, certainly the two older teenage children, Diane and John, would come to their senses and her rescue. Surely, it was only a game. In the orderly, pleasant world Barbara inhabited, nice children--and they were nice children--didn't hold an adult captive. But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it--their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized man"--Dust jacket.