Everyone who pisses off creepy 8 year old Rhoda dies – she couldn’t be murdering them. Could she…? DUuuuuuUUUUuuuuuhhhhh… waaaaaaaaaaaauUUGHghhhhhh! Muauarrrhghhhh! Wap wap waaaaaaap. Sorry, just trying to wrangle my brain to review this garbage semi-coherently!
Awful, just awful. The “pscyho kid that kills” premise might’ve been fun had there been anything more to The Bad Seed than that. Except William March was as unimaginative a storyteller as he was incompetent a writer so does nothing with the concept beyond the initial murder.
Most of the book is spent in the company of Rhoda’s insufferable mother, Christine, a prime candidate for the most stupid, gormless twit in all literature, who putters about wringing her hands wondering if her kid’s evil enough to kill. There’s nothing worse than waiting for the characters in the story to catch up to what the reader already knows, especially when that’s all that’s going on! There’s zero tension, it’s just duller than dull.
What little story there is is pathetic. After the opening murder, a moronic pedo janitor taunts Rhoda that he knows she killed that kid and that he’s gonna blackmail her. Gee, d’you think disturbed Rhoda’s gonna murder the moronic pedo janitor to keep herself safe, considering she’s killed before for much less??! It’s not just obvious, it’s tedious as it takes the entire book for Rhoda to get around to something so predictable.
So what happens between the murder that opens the book and the murder that closes it? Nothing worthwhile. Christine writes letters to her absent husband in an annoying, melodramatic tone and visits her boring friends for endless banal teas – ie. scenes that have nothing to do with anything. Later on – hack that March was – Christine conveniently remembers some key details about her mother that leads her to the retarded genetics explanation for why Rhoda is the way she is. Apparently if you have an ancestor who was a murderer, your lineage is doomed to become murderers too. Beyond. Fucking. Dumb.
The dreary characters are one-dimensional, there’s too much useless padding throughout and all of it was poorly written (those run-on sentences – it’s called a full stop, dude!). It even feels like March was workshopping ideas for the story’s final act as he was writing it and forgot to take them out - Christine and some librarian chat about how to end the novel “she” is writing! Garbage.
This feeble book wasn’t at any point interesting, creepy or suspenseful. Rosemary’s Baby and Psycho are similarly pulpy horror from this era but not nearly as terrible, mostly because Ira Levin and Robert Bloch brought stories to the table! This was absolutely shit - I can see why it’s largely forgotten these days. The Bad Seed is a bad pseudo-horror novel.
Very interesting according to horrific terrible things happening in today's world. The end was quite surprising.
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