The Playroom [Paperback]

Frances Hegarty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1992

Architect David Allendale refuses to allow his four-year-old daughter to interrupt the perfect harmony of his life and locks her in the playroom, where she evolves into something monstrous. Reprint. NYT.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this harrowing psychological thriller, a woman who appears to have everything she wants acquiesces when her husband locks their daughter in the playroom for a month. Hegarty also writes as Frances Fyfield.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Hegarty, better known under her pseudonym of Frances Fyfield (A Question of Guilt, 1989, etc.), shows in clinical detail how an apparently model husband and father could kill his young daughter by slow abuse, all without interference from his wife or anyone else. After a gratuitously harrowing prologue snapshot of four-year-old Jeanetta Allendale in extremis, starving to death in her locked playroom, the novel goes back to show the seeds of discord in her charming architect father David's lavish devotion to his son Jeremy and his complete ascendancy over his fragile, childlike, conflict- shunning wife Katherine--he cleans their house obsessively, picks out all her clothes (and discards whatever she buys on her own), pinches her pin-money from her purse, and monitors her relations with her London world so closely that it's a snap to pry her loose from her job, her neighbors, and finally Jeanetta (whom he's convinced isn't his child anyway, she's so big and blond and irrepressible). Katherine's tragically porous support system--her sister Mary (who inherited Katherine's last lover), her mother-in-law Sophie (herself the victim of an abusive husband, naturally), Jeanetta's kindly but rough-hewn nanny Eileen Harrison, her friends Jenny, Susan, and Monica, and frustrated social-worker John Mills--all share, whatever their own vices, a foolish innocence, an exasperating openness to deception that recalls Ruth Rendell at her cruelest. But the woolliness of the principals' self-absorbed monologues--a far cry from the arrowlike trajectory of Rendell's Judgment in Stone--imparts a distinctively realistic edge of horror to this desperately depressing story. Nobody will finish this painful novel unmoved. Many readers, though, won't be able to finish it at all. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket Books (Mm) (November 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671735837
• ISBN-13: 978-0671735838
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,412,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgetable, July 2, 2000

By 

"tamarafisher" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Playroom (Hardcover)

Okay, I'll admit it; I bought this book for a buck when it was being remaindered. I'd never heard of the thing before, hadn't heard of the author, but the jacket had an admiring quote from Ruth Rendell (enough said!) This book is not politically correct. It is dark and deep and not very lovely. But it is also unforgetable. It lodges there in the mind with the great horror stories, like Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and Henry James's TURN OF THE SCREW.

The subject matter is simple enough:an urban neighborhood, a dysfunctional family functional enough to fool most of those neighbors, an innocent but unfortunately chunky child, and a father who seems normal on the surface, but underneath makes Hannibal Lector look like Mr. Rogers.

This book takes chances and this writer isn't afraid to lift up rocks and look under them, then unblinking describe what she sees.

This book may be a neglected masterpiece of suspense. A fun read?--no. A terrifying one, both primal and modern--yes.