by Stephen King
First published 1983
Todd Bowden has everything a sixteen-year-old could want: top grades, a paper route, parents who trust him completely. Then he figures out that his elderly neighbor, Arthur Dussander, is not a retired German businessman. He is a former concentration camp commander who has been hiding in a California suburb for decades, wanted for crimes that killed thousands. Todd does not call the police. He sits down at Dussander's kitchen table and makes a deal. Keep quiet in exchange for stories. The real stories. What happened inside the camps, told in detail, told slowly, told again and again. What begins as blackmail curdles into something neither of them expected. Dussander starts sleeping better. Todd starts sleeping worse. The old man's memories crawl into the boy's waking hours, and Todd finds that knowing about evil is not the same as being safe from it. Each of them holds a secret that could destroy the other, and each of them is changing in ways they cannot stop. King builds the horror not from monsters but from two people who choose, repeatedly, to go further.
Genres: american-fiction, horror, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller, dark
Vibes: dark, intense, morally-complex, psychological, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: corruption-arc, moral-ambiguity, power-dynamics, secrets-and-lies
Setting: California, concentration camp
Period: 20th-century
179 pages · Paperback · Warner
Content warnings: child-abuse, murder, torture