Jay Anson (1921–1980)

Really? This is it? The great book that spawned a movie franchise and endless ripoffs?

A family out of their depth financially have a stressful move to a crappy new house with poor insulation and some bad smells. The house was sold cheap because someone got murdered there. They stay there for about a month before having worked themselves up in a lather about the place being haunted.
The author keeps insisting these are normal and skeptical people. Within that single month they have contacted a priest to do a blessing of the house, they've had a medium there to talk to the spirits, they've gone around the place trying to "bless" the house by randomly chanting the Lord's Prayer because that's how they imagined it should be done. They're talking about exorcisms. These are some amazingly credulous people, despite the author's insistence. Their 'encounters' often come in the form of dreams that bear a striking resemblance to books and movies like [b:The Exorcist|179780|The Exorcist|William Peter Blatty|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1375168676l/179780._SY75_.jpg|1945267] (book 1971, movie 1973) with floating off the bed, or [b:Rosemary's Baby|228296|Rosemary's Baby (Rosemary's Baby, #1)|Ira Levin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327878603l/228296._SY75_.jpg|883024] (book 1967, movie 1968) with hidden rooms and some mumbo jumbo about satanists. These events supposedly take place in 1975 which gives everyone plenty of time to know exactly what to expect from a spooky house from some of the most successful (and infinitely better) horror stories of that time.

If they aren't just lying outright, everyone involved is going hysterical and expressing what they've been programmed to see by popular media. It's also a product of its time, like the aforementioned books, in that it treats parapsychology as science, along with ESP and other spooky goodness. That didn't age very well, and neither did this book.

If anything it actually gets worse if you take it seriously. The suggestion is made repeatedly that this is the work of the devil and/or some demons and apparently can, from a phone line, slap a priest around with its evil power (apparently working for God gave him no power to even resist let alone fight this demonic force) but by the end of the book we find out these hauntings can be defeated by a new family moving in and rearranging furniture (as to explain nobody else ever having experienced anything from this same house). Oh sure. The devil haunts a fireplace but is ill equipped to handle a new set of chairs.… (més)

The Amityville Horror is basically the after-action report of a haunting in a big old house in Amityville, New York, a house where several murders took place several years before. The new family is informed of the history of the home, but not being particularly superstitious, doesn't really mind. It's a big old house, pretty, suits their needs perfectly. Except it really is haunted, and it causes all sorts of problems.

This book ought to have been right up my alley. It's been on my to-read list for ages as a classic horror novel that's so well thought of that it's been adapted into several movies and has been the inspiration for hundreds more, and I finally decided to pick it up when I was in a slump, really looking for something to start my reading engine again.

However, I ended up skimming this book. For whatever reason, it just didn't hook me at all, and it reminded me far too strongly of The Conjuring. It honestly wasn't very scary, and certainly wasn't very compelling. And that really makes me sad, because that sort of no-nonsense reporting style tends to really speak to me.… (més)