The Amityville Horror – Jay Anson

Published: 13 September 1977
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Pages: 315
Series: stand Alone
Format Read:Audible
Duration: 6h 27min

Blurp:

28 Days of Terror in a House Possessed by Evil Spirits

In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their dream home, the same home where Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers and sisters just one year earlier. The psychic phenomena that followed created the most terrifying experience the Lutz family had ever encountered, forcing them to flee the house in 28 days, convinced that it was possessed by evil spirits. Their fantastic story, never before disclosed in full detail, makes for an unforgettable book with all the shocks and gripping suspense of The Exorcist, The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby, but with one vital difference…The story is true…

Thoughts:

I will start my review out with the statement that this book somehow found a way to creep me out quite a bit. It was only halfway through that I saw that this was “a True Story”, how close to the truth I will never truly know, but that does not matter to me. I have seen people give this 1 star ratings and shitting on the author’s apparent bland vocabulary and boring story telling. I think some people need to stop for a while and look at the date this was first published. The world was still new to so many unexplained things and I can just imagine the uproar this novel would have caused back then. In today’s terms everything is so convenient and apparently easy to just look up, but looking it up on the internet also needs to not be taken too seriously as fake news and creepy pastas has since become a certain fashion.

I am not a big believer in hauntings and demonic possession or ghosts these days. I do, however, or rather have had some form of interactions of my own with supposed supernatural phenomena. I do not know if I should talk about it, but let us just say I used to take ghost hunting and do my own research around trying to communicate with the dead, not that I wanted to communicate with them, I just wanted to understand it all.

If you are not familiar with what happened in Amityville, there was a guy who killed his family claiming that he was told to do so, or did it to quiet the voices that were constantly following him. A year later a new family moved in and weird things started to happen around them. This book is said to be a chronological telling of how things went down. People’s moods changed, the little girl talked with an imaginary friend that had a pig’s head. Doors would become unhinged with no explanation, objects would move around, scents could be smelled and other things that go hand in hand with haunted house shenanigans. The part that one of the priests played in this telling was so weird to read, initially from the start where he was asked to bless the house at the start of the book to where he physically heard the words “get out!” and later having flue and some form of skin stigmata for no reason at all, as well as his fellow priests asked him to never go back there and the reluctance of other like minded individuals refused to help the Lutzes was quite profound.

It is weird that a book like this could crawl underneath my skin so badly that I was almost too scared to listen to it on my daily morning routine at work. It is darker in the mornings now due to our winter time, it is cold and I sometimes felt that something was either watching me or just moving outside my field of vision. I got my final fright when one of my colleagues some how managed to sneak up behind me and just said hello, that I almost soiled the toilet cubicle I had just cleaned. Books like that deserve an extra point from me and even though it goes against everything most of the critics say over at GR, I could not give a shit about their opinions. I gave Amityville Horror a 4 out of 5. I also stated that even if the story is not true or was heavily embellished it still made for a creepy read. If it was true and as true as the book wants me to believe then I have some more research to go and do. I am glad I picked this one up, I do not know if it is a book I can recommend to anyone, certainly if you want a late Halloween read, this should do nicely.

Quick! Look Behind you!!!