The playground by Aron Beauregard book review and analysis

The playground by Aron Beauregard is a horrendously violent, gory, and fucked up book, with deep themes and amazingly well written characters. And there is a lot to be said about the symbolism and foreshadowing in the book. This review contains spoilers, and please check a comprehensive trigger warning online before continuing.

The foreshadowing and symbolism start in the very first chapter of the book when Rock is scouting out parents and kids at the playground on a rainy day. He watches a mom with her son on a leash on the swingset. In his internal monologue we can hear him thinking about how that kid is already doomed in much the same way that he is to a life of suffering at the hands of a controlling mother. The leash becomes an important piece of symbolism that drives his character arc later in the book, and represents that way that he himself feels leashed to his mother, like he can only go and do what he's allowed and any missteps are punished by her shortening the leash and taking away the few freedoms that he has.

In his internal monologue he thinks, "Most children in his position would be rocking back and forth, testing the limits and heights they could push themselves to..." and notes that the kid he's seeing is barely swinging on the swing set, and certainly not enjoying it. This particular line is foreshadowing the playground that all of the kids find themselves in later and the swingset with the flames underneath in particular. The playground that the kids find themselves in forces them to push themselves to the absolute limit of their minds and bodies, and then past it. In order to keep moving forward in the playground, the kids learn quickly that all physical pain, discomfort, and trauma must be ignored and pushed through if they want to stay alive. There's one obstacle in particular in the playground that I think is especially foreshadowed with this line, and that is the swing set. The swing set in the playground is a massive swing set sitting on the edge of a platform with a large gap inbetween it and the next platform. There are two seats, and the two kids have to swing as hard as they can to get enough momentum to make the jump onto the other platform. Failure means falling into a seemingly never-ending black pit and certain death. As the two kids start swinging back and forth trying to get the speed needed to make the jump, a fire is lit underneath the swing set, melting the bottom of their shoes, burning their legs, and eventually melting the bottom of the swings themselves threatening to drop them into the flames.

There is a lot more symbolism that can even be fit into a review like this, but this was one of the first ones that stood out to me and one of the ones that stuck with me through the entire book.

Shortly after this in The False Idol, we start getting introduced to some of the other kids that are going to be in the playground, the Matthews family specifically, and some of their family dynamics. Those kids are CJ, Kip, Bobby, and Tanya, and their parents are Greg and Lacey. Right from the start it's clear that Greg views his kids more as possessions and trophies to be showcased around rather than their own people. He forces the kids into sports that they don't want to play and rewards them with free time and enjoyment for meeting his impossible standards. We see Kip being forced to keep practicing for hours without a break and told that he can earn his free time when he's as good as his brother CJ. We see Bobby being talked about as a disappointment and failure for choosing to skateboard instead of play baseball. And we see the exchange between Tanya and her mom Lacey where she wants to do competitive swimming but her mom pressures her to do cheer instead. This, too, ties back to the symbolism of the leash. His kids are not granted to freedom to explore the things that they really want to do, they're leashed down and led wherever their parents demand they go.

The family dynamic of the Matthews is incredibly written and, in my opinion, portrays an abusive and controlling family very very well. The looks that the brothers give each other when they're being pitted against each other and berated, not looks of anger or dislike towards each other but of understanding and sympathy, are very accurate to those kind of relationships.

As we start to see more from Geraldine, Dr.Fuchs, and Rock, we start to see two of my favorite themes of the book: sometimes no amount of money in the world will buy the one thing that will truly make you happy and being rich allows people to commit unspeakable acts of evil. The book feels very anti-capitalist in it's entirety, but there is a line in particular that just highlights and reiterates this point well. In Gentle Giant, Geraldine says, “These lowly peasants wallow in filth and poverty, yet, ironically, they’ve created something even my wealth can’t buy, the thing I wanted most, something even a brilliant mind such as yours couldn’t give me, Mr. Fuchs." She's talking about having biological kids of her own. We learn in the book that she's had countless medical experiments and infertility treatments done, some even in the realm of human experimentation, just for the hopes of having a biological child, to no avail.

The anti-capitalist themes continue as we see Tom, the father of Issac, Sadie, and Sam, continually question whether or not this was something that he and Molly really should be doing. He was extremely hesitant and thought that testing the playground, even for the thousands of dollars, was a risk to his kids' safety that he didn't want to take. While these families were assured that it was completely safe, all of them knew that it was with its risks and chose to take that risk on behalf of their kids for the money anyways.

The theme that being rich lets you commit unspeakable acts of evil without any repercussions is shown through in a few ways but one of the biggest is in Dr. Fuchs and Geraldine's relationship. It's revealed in the book that Dr. Fuchs was a nazi scientist and engineer who designed most of the concentration camps during the holocaust and ran most of the human experimentation and torture at the camps, and that he took great pleasure in the suffering of his victims. It is for this reason that Geraldine sought him out and offered him the deal that led to their relationship. She offered him an easy life where he wouldn't have to run from the law and he'd have his every need and want provided for in her estate in exchange for him doing any engineering and human experimentation that she needed. The goal at first was to get her to be able to have biological kids of her own, but once they realized that simply was not possible for her, she kept him around and he designed the playground in its entirety. The only way that he and Geraldine were able to do the things that they did was because they had the money for a huge, isolated estate, and enough to build and design anything they could conjure up.

In the same vein of thought, Greg's abuse of his children came down to his quest for riches and fame. He forced the boys into baseball because it was a high paying competitive sport , something that they could both make a comfortable living doing and bring fame to the Matthews family name. Even in the playground, he was more worried about his kids "winning" and outliving the other kids than he was about their actual safety and lives.

The Grimely family are the stark contrast meant to give us a look into a healthy family dynamic. Both Tom and Molly seem to really care for their kids and their kids' well being. They want the money from letting them test the playground, but truly believe it to be safe and are far more concerned with their kids having a good day. We can see this in the dialogue we get from them in the car before they pick their kids up. Molly is talking about how, because they're poor, she has no idea when they may be able to give the kids an experience that compares to the new hightech playground that they were promised, and she doesn't want the kids to miss out on formative experiences just because they don't have the money. The money that they were promised to be paid is just a bonus on top of the kids getting to have a great day, but the kids were both her and Tom's priority.

I think the fact the the Grimelys are poor and don't have the money to give their kids everything that they want adds a lot of depth to the story. Rock see's their family dynamic, and that is what causes him to break free from the leash his mother keeps him on and to be able to start making his own choices. Sam, Sadie, and Issac are not spoiled kids; they are far from getting everything they want or having their every whim fulfilled, and in terms of material wealth, they have very little. So the fact that Rock sees what they have, as someone with all the material wealth one could ever ask for, and feels jealous adds such depth that I don't think would have read the same if the Grimely kids had also had material wealth. Its one thing for someone rich to want more than they already have and something else entirely for them to long for less. But we see that Rock would have traded all the wealth and luxury of Geraldine for even a taste of what the Grimely kids had.

Rock actually becomes my favorite character in the book. As the story builds and more and more of the children die untimely death, and especially as Tom and Molly start to recognize him as the victim he is, we get to see his inner struggles. All his life he's done what Geraldine told him he had to, and the threats he faced for rebelling were too great to even consider it. When we learned about the branding in his chest from Geraldine that said "MINE", it came as both a shock and a devastation, and changed my entire outlook on his character. He went from someone I saw as complicit in the deaths of the children to a victim himself. He was so abused, brainwashed, and tortured as a child that he didn't even have the ability to think for himself until Molly and Tom started telling him that he could. One of the parts of his story line that I really liked was the fact that his sheer size and strength was emphasized so often during the book. He was described as huge and being able to endure so much physical pain, so there's no doubt that he could have overpowered Geraldine's small, old frame years before he did. Physically, there had been nothing stopping him, likely for his entire adult life, which shows just how emotionally and mentally broken he was from Geraldine's abuse.

The end of the book where he's bleeding out on the real playground and asked by Molly what he's going to do and he responds "play" was the only scene in the book that truly made me cry. His entire character arc until that point had led to this conclusion; there was no other ending for him. We see earlier that he feels the guilt for all the harm he's caused even though he wasn't really at fault for it. He asks if he deserved the abuse, struggles with the idea that he is evil for all he's done, and decides that he is unforgivable. Once he's free from the leash that Geraldine has kept him on for all these years, all he can do is try to free the remaining kids and parents, and accept the death he knows he deserves. He knows that he has to die to pay for the things that he's done, and to truly free himself from the trauma of his past, and the only thing that he wants to do before he dies is to play, just once. And as we see him limp and crawl across the playground, wincing in pain, determined to play just this once, all I could feel was sad for him. His character was my favorite, as was his death.

Geraldine become another one of my favorite characters for how well she's written. Geraldine was born disturbed, born evil, and nothing ever could have changed it. She was truly doomed from the moment she was born. When we get further into the book and finally get a glimpse of her childhood and her motivations, we realize its even more fucked up than we had thought. I thought that her sole motivations were to exact revenge on the families who were able to have biological kids that they did not deserve, but we realize later that her motivations are far worse than that, and the death of these kids is some kind of erotic release for her. The reason that she wanted biological kids so badly was to be able to sexually abuse them for her own twisted gratification and to fulfill her lifelong attraction to her own mother. Her perverseness ran so deep that she even killed her own mother for a sexual release, and built her hall of mirrors chasing the high from it that she was never able to reach again.

The most fucked up scene from the entire book in my opinion was one from her childhood.

In the chapter about her childhood, there is a scene talking about her infatuation and obsession with her mothers ass, an infatuation so strong that it causes her to eat her mothers shit while masturbating with it. This is described as the best orgasm she's had in her entire life. Truthfully, this scene made me gag. The image this painted in my head of a child laying on a bathroom floor, eating and masturbating with her own mother's shit, in all the horrendous details, genuinely made me want to throw up. But it speaks volumes about Geraldine's character and desires. Truly when I say that she was born evil beyond repair and nothing could have ever changed it, I mean it. I kept looking for something —anything— that could be explained why she was the way that she was. I thought that maybe her own parents had abused her and manipulated her into thinking this was okay. I thought maybe something traumatic had happened to motivate her. There was nothing, it was all her. It takes an incredible amount of skill to depict someone so truly evil and vile without any outside motivation to their actions.

Now on to what made this book so compelling and interesting: the creativity. Everything from the characters backstories, to the deaths, to the playground itself were so creatively done. I didn't feel that any of it was predictable, and spent the entire book in suspense of what would happen next. When I was trying to think of how the playground would kill the kids at the beginning of the book, nothing that I thought could happen did, and if you asked me to predict even one death in the book the only one I would have even been close on was Rock's. Every section of the playground felt like something new and unexpected. Landmines, vats of acid, a meat grinder, a pit of shards of glass and venomous snakes, it was all amazingly written and unexpected.

My favorite section of the playground was the hopsctoch game from hell. When this scene started, I was expecting something more like the swinging blades that we see later on the seesaw or the spring rockers, and the real danger shocked me. The imagery of the cows being ground alive, their pained screams echoing, and their remains being dumped full force over the kids balancing on the hopscotch board was vivid. The imagery of Kip being ground up and his remains dumped all over his brother was even more vivid, but in case it weren't, this is one of the few illustrated pictures we get in the book. Not only was this my favorite section of the playground, but Kips death set the tone for the next few sections, and was what lead to Issac sacrificing himself for Donnie.

A rivalry had been started between Bobby and the Grimley kids, and there was no way it could have ended except in both of their deaths. I was still hopeful for a while that Issac might make it out, but quickly realized that there's no way he would. This rivalry also gave me my favorite moment from any of the parents: when Greg used his final words to any of his kids to tell Bobby to murder Sadie and use her body like a skateboard to go down the slide, as a protection for himself. The outrage and anger that this seen gave me is unmatched by almost anything else in the book. I tried justifying it, thinking that trauma makes us do fucked up things and doesn't let us think clearly, but I knew that the truth was just that Greg was as evil as Geraldine when it really came down to it.

All in all, this book was one of my favorites. There wasn't a single point where I felt bored or disinterested in the entire book. Every plot twist was like a perfectly executed gut punch. The characters were likable (or hateable), but well written and well rounded, even Donnie who didn't speak a word the entire book. It was fun and easy to read, and hard to put down. I don't know if I'll ever read it again because the plot twists and revelations were really important to the intensity of the story and I'm not sure rereading it would be the same, but that said it was still one of my favorites and I'd recommend it for anyone with an interest in gore and psychological horror.