Amityville... where scary things come from

First, let me just say I cannot read this book without thinking of Mike Arnzen. I'm sure many of you already know this, but for those who don't, Mike is originally from Amityville -- or he at least lived there for a time during his childhood -- a fact that never ceases to make me giggle at its appropriateness.

But on to the critique.

May I just start by saying, this is one time I really wish we had watched the movie instead of reading the book. The best thing I can say about the book is it was a fast, easy read. Other than that? Oy vey!

The Amityville Horror was one of the first horror movies I ever saw, and it scared the crap out of me. In an earlier blog I said I can't sleep with my closet door open because of Stephen King's "The Bogeyman" from Night Shift; likewise, I can't be in a house at night without pulling all the shades/curtains because of The Amityville Horror and that goddamned pig.

That still gives me the willies.

Usually, when a book has been made into a movie, I prefer the book. This is one of the rare instances where I much prefer the movie... or movies, in this case. Both movies creeped me out (although I prefer the original), but the book leaves me completely flat. The problem is the writing style. It just does not do justice to the story.

Although I believe, as I think most do, that The Amityville Horror is a work of fiction, I still think that as ghost stories go, it's a pretty good story. I think this is particularly true of the movies, and even though I think the book leaves a great deal to be desired as far as the writing goes, I think the storyline itself is pretty compelling. I like stories with religious undertones and like others of that same time period (Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Carrie, The Omen), I think this story does a good job of incorporating that theme.

I think this is why I like the movies but not the book -- the storyline is good. It's just the writing that sucks.

In this book, Jay Anson seems to do everything a good writer should not do: he relies on overused punctuation to express emotion; he pulls the reader out of the book by switching tenses and points of view; and he "tells" the story instead of "showing" it.

Although I'm not going to spend a long time on the topic, let's just say that Anson's use of the exclamation point is pointless. When I am teaching writing, whether creative writing or freshman composition, I constantly tell my students that if they want to use something for emphasis, they need to be sure they don't OVERuse it. When something is overused it becomes a distraction, not an enhancement, of the text. When I read Laurell K Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures, her constant metaphors for the oppressive heat nearly drove me insane. When I read Jack Ketchum's The Lost, his sentences fragments and run-ons almost made me refuse to read another of his books (luckily, that was not typical of him). For Anson, it was the exclamation point!!!! Anson should have thought about using language that is descriptive and evokes emotion, instead of just "telling" the audience that they should put a certain emphasis on the sentence because of its punctuation.

My second issue with Anson's writing is the way he would constantly pull the reader out of the action by switching tenses and points of view. Although Anson writes consistently in 3rd person limited-omniscient (with Father Mancuso, George and Kathy being the primary pov characters), there are several places where his voice as the narrator/recorder can be heard. This typically happens when he switches to a present tense and begins to talk about how the character later felt about an incident. Although I think it's perfectly normal and even desirable to explain how the character was feeling, I think it would have been more convincing to include it in the primary story narrative than it was to pull it out like he did. For me, every time he did that, I was jarred out of the story and reminded that this was supposedly a "true" story that was later denounced, as so many "true" ghost stories are.

My third issue is directly related to the second. There are dozens of places in the book where Anson could have focused in to what was happening in his story and really improved the creep-out, but instead chose to crap out. One perfect example of this is on pages 145 to 146 where he describes the part where Kathy gets squeezed by the two spirits competing over her body. This could have been a fully-realized creep-scene, but Anson chooses to end it prematurely with Kathy passing out. He uses the same technique later with George. That technique is a cop out. I'm sure Anson's argument would be that he was just recording what Kathy and George told him, but since I think this book is much more fiction than truth, I wouldn't buy that argument. I think this is another reason I like the movies better. The movies didn't shy away from the really frightening stuff; they embraced it.

He also does this in a couple of places by replacing the "showing" narrative with that present-tense narrator voice I mentioned previously. Along a similar vein, especially when people are getting into arguments, he has things happen so quickly that I couldn't understand how it escalated... or sometimes even why it escalated. A good example of that is when Father Mancuso gets into a fight with the Pastor (160 - 161). He talks about this fight ruining their friendship, but I honestly could not figure out why. It really wasn't a very bad fight. I've had worse arguments with myself. I think Anson's general lack of "showing" and tendency to "tell" left me feeling like I'd been cheated out of any kind of real understanding of these characters.

There were, however, some background issues that were really intriguing to me that come up in the book but not the movies. For instance, the part about John Ketcham was interesting, as I realized that this may be Dallas Mayr got his pen name. I also thought the part about the psychic born with the "caul" was interesting also, since Stephen King uses that in The Shining as well.

Personally, though, I think the most interesting part of the story is not what supposedly happened to the Lutzes, but what really did happen to the DeFeos. I did a little research on the topic and found out that there is a "true crime" story out there about those murders. I think I might try to find that book.

Through my research, however, I did find something very chilling regarding the haunting of this house. It was the following picture:

This picture was supposedly taken during the seances after the Lutzes left the house. There were no children in the house. In an interview, George Lutz had this to say about this photo, "Gene Campbell, who was a professional photographer, was brought into the house in 1976 when the Warrens went in with their team. He set up an automatic camera on the 2nd floor landing that shot off infrared film, black and white, throughout the night. There are literally rolls of film with nothing on them. There's only one picture of the little boy [...]We then asked my kids if they knew who this was. Missy said it was the little boy she used to play with in the house." (see full quote at http://ghoststudy.com/monthly/oct04/amityville.htm)

The little boy is hard to see in the full picture, but blown up, he is clear as day. I don't believe in ghosts, and I'm sure there is a rational explanation (including the fact that the Lutzes may have made it up they way they did everything else), but this picture freaks me out. Every time I look at it, my stomach lurches.

In fact, the picture disturbs me so much, I'm going to delete it from my computer as soon as I've posted this blog.

Maybe the Lutzes weren't COMPLETE nut cases after all.