The Bad Seed by William March

She stood up, smiled, tilted her head back, and clapped her hands in a lovely little gesture she'd picked up somewhere. "If I give you a basket of kisses, what will you give me?" she asked. "What will you give me, Mother? What will you give me?"

Christine Penmark and her daughter Rhoda are living in a new apartment while her husband travels for work. Monica Breedlove is their neighbor, and Leroy is the creepy handyman. Rhoda is enrolled in grammar school, and one outing is the annual picnic. She is curt and moody because she wanted to win the medal for penmanship, but she didn't—Claude Daigle did, and he pinned it to the pocket of his shirt. Later, Claude is fished to the shore of the river after carelessly falling in. As tragedy slowly spreads through the town, Christine thinks back over strange instances in other places they lived. At one place, their dog fell out the window; at another, an elderly friend fell down the stairs. Coincidences Rhoda is blissfully unconcerned with. Could her child be so unempathetic as to cause such harm? Christine subtly looks for answers from Monica Breedlove's brother, who is fascinated with true crime stories.

He lends her some to read, and what Christine finds shocks her, hitting too close to home. Rhoda's singleness of purpose and incessant lying present a totally new character in novels and imprinted the term 'bad seed' into pop culture. Only Leroy sees beneath her facade, taunting her about Claude. Does he really know what happened at the picnic, or is he just agitating her with a nasty game? She is getting nervous and wishes he would just go away. He's such a silly man.

This is the classic novel that inspired the classic film. Tense and entertaining, it didn't disappoint. Filled with intelligent psychology, it set the tone of society in the fifties. Ladies were expected to have their children behave a certain way, but what can you do with a narcissistic demon like Rhoda?

In 1954, it was an instant sensation, called "undoubtedly one of the year's best" and "an almost impeccable novel of suspense." The New York Times declared "no more satisfactory novel will be written in 1954 or has turned up in recent memory." With praise from fellow writers Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, The Bad Seed went on to sell over a million copies.

The Maxwell Anderson hit play ran for 322 performances before the cast filmed the movie. Patty McCormack, as the gleefully evil Rhoda, earned an Oscar nomination and was forever associated with that role. Years later, she made the low-budget horror flick Mommy (1995) and the sequel Mommy's Day, where she played a mother psychotically obsessed with her 12-year-old daughter.

It is a chilling novel I'd put next to Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings.

1954 / Tradeback / 217 pages