THE BOGEYMAN

This one's about an unutterably unspeakable family, the Roberts; Jack, a teacher (the Bogeyman); his dreadful teenagers, Natalie and Justin; his tearful wife Edith who has just had a baby--unwanted. When they talk to each other at all, they sound like an unsupervised group therapy session. Everything does not really change for the better when they get an au pair girl; Edith has more time in which only to feel more useless and she has a breakdown; Justin (after an orgy) and Natalie (after a night in London and an attempt to kill her father) disappear. The Bogeyman finally realizes with some degree of regret that he has driven them away. Some of Miss Forster's readers won't be around either. Even though she writes with a fine eye and ear for the disagreeable commonplace, she cannot salvage any concern to give the story much more than the curiosity of what will happen next.