Im Basement: Meditationen Über E. Menschenopfer

On October 26, 1965, the body of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens was found on a dirty mattress in a basement in Indianapolis, Indiana. Starved, mutilated, covered with cigarette burns, the victim had been imprisoned and tortured to death by a gang of teenagers led by a woman named Gertrude Baniszewski, in whose care Sylvia and her younger sister, Jenny, had been left while their parents went off to work the state fairs in the Midwest.

Gertrude's band of tormentors included some of her own seven children and two neighborhood boys. On the abdomen of the young girl had been carved the words "I am a prostitute and proud of it."

With mesmerizing detail, Millett re-creates this American tragedy. Shocking and poignant, "The Basement" rocks some of our most basic notions of family, morality, and the cultural repression of female sexuality.

"A poetic meditation upon the nature of pain and cruelty... A major contribution to psychojournalism."
- Library Journal

"Grimly compelling, not to be ignored."
- The New York Times Book Review