Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case.
Though Tony Costa's gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts, until decades later.
#THE BABYSITTER BOOK SERIAL#
To Liza, he was one of the few kind, understanding, and safe adults in her life.īut there was one thing she didn't know their babysitter was a serial killer. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his "secret garden" in the Truro woods. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter-the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked-took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. George captures the loneliness that comes from participating in a society that feels rigged against sadness, intimacy, and genuine expression.This chilling true story and "harrowing account of the evil that can lurk around the edges of girlhood" (Carolyn Murnick, author of The Hot One)-reminiscent of Ann Rule's classic The Stranger Beside Me-follows a little girl longing for love who finds friendship with her charismatic babysitter, unaware that he is a vicious serial killer.
#THE BABYSITTER BOOK FULL#
The hilarious and heartbreaking stories are long, some the length of novellas, and full of sardonic observations on the futility of what is generally considered maturity or success or love. They're so far outside the spectrum it's as if they're waving from another world. It's an understatement to proclaim that these pieces are unlike anything else in contemporary literature. Reading Jen George's The Babysitter at Rest is like having a heart-to-heart with the most bizarre babysitter you can imagine―a sly representative of a world that seems at first to be like yours but, upon inspection, reveals itself to be tinged with more weirdness, more darkness, and considerably more sex. Ne of the most tender and grittiest collections I have read. Jen George skewers the damaging cultural imagery of acceptable female adultness.Ī headlong charge through the process of becoming―an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything. Sometimes while reading I had to stop and ask myself, "How does a person write this?"Īrkly humorous.
But underneath all the weird and the funny and the kinda gross stuff, these stories perfectly capture what it's like being a person in the world who is just trying to figure shit out. But what I do know is that they are funny―funny because they're true! And also funny because it's so sad it's true! And also just funny-funny. The Babysitter at Rest is a collection of five short. George writes with an ear for raw thought patterns her renderings of characters reproduced by their preferences and reduced to sad adulthoods are exquisite.Ī brilliant and surprising debut collection of short fiction. Her stories are at once poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in their inappropriate and reckless abandon. Jen George has a way of bending the narrative which is distinctly her own. It's a place which is at first recognizable, before it becomes completely warped. Reading The Babysitter at Rest is an immersion into a hidden world.
When's the last time you read an opening line this charged? "On a bed in the emergency room, being pumped full of morphine and oxycodone, vomiting, then being pumped full of the same medications, I recall the ways I've always been." (That little information about George is available―she was born in California and lives in New York―only heightens the appeal her work stands alone.) George goes there again and again, combining the profane and the pathetic with a rarely seen energy. And thus her commitment is both funny and kind of spiritual at the same time―and by laughing, you're admitting this female inner universe exists. We all know it's commitment to something absurd that makes things funny―but in The Babysitter at Rest Jen George commits to scenarios that are not just absurd but weird in a deeply true, "unspeakable-underpinning-of-reality" sort of way. George's writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal, seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable. The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of stories. This brilliantly caustic début collection of stories is an attack on the pieties of contemporary social life and the niceties of traditional fiction. I feel drunk with love for these stories. Included in The Believer's "Favorite Books from 2016," Electric Literature's "Best Short Story Collections of 2016," and The A.V.
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