Jay Anson - The Amityville Horror (1977)

I saw a demon when I was fifteen, maybe sixteen. I was in bed. It was dark outside, and looking to the gap between the curtain and the window, I could see a terrifying face gazing in at me. It had the traditional hooked nose and a pair of tiny horns projecting forward from its forehead just above the eyebrows. Because the window was down near my feet, I was seeing this from an angle, and the demon, which was facing forward, was looking downwards and to its right in order to meet my eye. I stared for a minute or two, gripped by something like provisional terror. I was fairly certain the apparition couldn't be real, but couldn't see any explanation for an illusion which failed to correspond with whatever could have been reflected in the glass; and so it appeared real for a short time, but not quite the same sort of real as the curtain, the bed, the wall, or my feet projecting from beneath the quilt. This wasn't the screaming terror we see in horror movies, but I suspect must be a fairly common emotion experienced by those who encounter what appears to be the supernatural. It may be what members of the Lutz family experienced in the house on Ocean Avenue, at least where what they saw, heard, or smelled could not be otherwise immediately rationalised.

My own demon, as I realised after a few minutes, actually was a reflection, the hooped wooden rings supporting my Habitat curtains forming both the hook of the nose and curve of the horns with terrifying fidelity.

I read The Amityville Horror in the year it came out, so far as I recall. I would have been twelve and my friend Paul habitually lent me books about flying saucers, alien visitors, and other unexplained staples from his father's substantial collection. The supernatural didn't seem too far removed from my usual discomfort zone, and I recall the book as both plausible and terrifying. Naturally my curiosity has increased over time, particularly given how little I read back then, and so here I am nearly fifty years later giving it another shot.

The story, as you probably know, describes the supernatural trials of a family spending their first month in a new house, one in which a series of grisly murders had occurred. With hindsight I realise my friend Paul may have been screwing with me, my own family having moved into a new house earlier that year. Anyway, in recent times I've noticed not only a movie adaptation but a series of sequels seemingly of a kind you wouldn't ordinarily find spun off from a true story, and closer scrutiny has revealed that maybe it wasn't. Jay Anson wrote the book, drawing from hours and hours of interviews with members of the Lutz family describing what they claim to have experienced, and his last word on the matter seems to have been that whether any of it happened or not, they clearly believed that it did. On the other hand, the book - which we may as well call a novel - seems to contain an unusual number of factual discrepancies in what happened to whom and where, and William Weber - defence lawyer for Ronald DeFeo, who committed the aforementioned series of grisly murders - claims to have cooked up the whole story with George and Kathy Lutz prior to Jay Anson writing the book; so, to cut a long preamble short, I'm reading this one out of curiosity and as a novel.

The Amityville Horror reads very much like a novel too, given its attention to mundane domestic detail serving as contrast to the alleged supernatural activity; and despite the non-fiction qualification listed on the spine, there's very little in the way of analysis, not even so much as was to be found in saucer literature of the time. The preface by the Reverend John Nicola offers waffle about how mere superstition must be kept separate from the rigorously documentarian disciplines of both science and religion, and what you will read almost certainly pertains to the latter, beyond which the narrative feels very much like a series of set pieces drawing on The Omen, The Shining and The Exorcist. So I enjoyed it, and it's efficiently written in the usual bestseller prose but it felt a little ridiculous in places - when George Lutz stops off for a pint at a bar called the Witches' Brew, for one example, and you can actually feel the author staring at you, waiting for shadows of fearful anticipation to cloud your coldly sweating brow. It's worth a read, I guess, and I don't regret reading it either back then or now, but it turns out that non-fiction printed on the spine did one fuck of a lot of the heavy lifting.