It's an accident of history that this grody, grimy, lurid exploitation book materialized at a time when film and TV was going through a self-imposed stylistic minimization. This kind of book needs a De Palma adaptation circa 1983, where the emotions grow and corruption is in every corner until finally the agonizing endings cascade insanity in escalating wildness, then drops the curtain in a couple hundred words of a curtsey to the audience. Plenty of "troubled lady with modern haircut returns to small home town with secrets" books before and after this one , but this one relentlessly, wildly, screams in your ear that she shouldn't have done that. It's frankly great, a bravura debut.