And she’s driving her mother, the overly cautious housewife Christine Penmark, literally crazy. Eight years old, with straight brown hair and a desire for tidiness that seems to border on the obsessive, Rhoda boasts an old-fashioned name and a stereotypically feminine, highly controlled style of dress and disposition that seem to be at extreme odds with her willingness to, for example, toss terrier puppies to their deaths from bedroom windows. Though readers may be more familiar with Macaulay Culkin’s apple-cheeked child psycho in 1993’s The Good Son, the grade-school sociopath to which all contemporary child killers can, and should, be compared is Rhoda Penmark, the focus of William March’s 1954 bestselling novel, The Bad Seed. I suppose if a novelist is going to imagine and give life to a character meant to be a memorable but also totally unexpected serial killer, it makes sense that he make her not only a young child but also a girl.
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