"And I wonder now if anything would have been different had she not been so pretty, had her body not been young and healthy and strong but ugly, fat, and flabby. Possibly not. Possibly it would have happened anyway. The inevitable punishment of the outsider.

But it seems to me more likely that it was precisely because she was beautiful and strong, and we were not, that Ruth and the rest of us had done this to her. To make a sort of judgment on that beauty, on what it meant and didn't mean to us."

-- Jack Ketchum
The Girl Next Door