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The Amityville Horror

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About this listen

In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property - complete with boathouse and swimming pool - and the price were too good to pass up.

Twenty-eight days later, the entire Lutz family fled in terror.

This is the spellbinding, best-selling, true story that gripped the nation - the story of a house possessed by evil spirits, haunted by psychic phenomena almost too terrible to describe.

Jay Anson began as a copy boy on the New York Evening Journal in 1937 and later worked in advertising and publicity. With more than 500 documentary scripts for television to his credit, he was associated with Professional Films, Inc. He died in 1980.

©1977 Jay Anson; published in arrangement with Lesia Anson (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Genre Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Religious Studies Paranormal Fiction Scary Parapsychology Fantasy

Critic reviews

"A fascinating and frightening book." ( Los Angeles Times)
"This book will scare the hell out of you." ( Kansas City Times)
All stars
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I read this many years o and have, obviously, watched the movie. When I saw this was included it was a no-brainer! I wasn’t disappointed. The narrative is as compelling and clear as ever it was and the horror as compelling as it is inexplicable. I really liked the lack of sensationalism, but instead the seriousness of what was being read by the teller. An excellent listen all round.

I don’t understand how people don’t like this!

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Creepy at times and an enjoyable listen. It’s not a book to LOVE but it’s okay :-)

It was good (ish)

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Really enjoyed this audible. Made me uneasy at points. Great if you're into the horror, supernatural ect. Love it because it's based on true events.

Brilliant!

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Overall the story is good but I did find myself a little bored at times as similar things happen over and over again and usually don't have much pay off. Since it's meant to be grounded in "fact" that sort of makes sense but having seen the film interpretation I found this less engaging. Of course the film takes huge liberties with the source material and was written to entertain the masses so this also makes sense. Performer was great often sounding a little like Ray Standz from the Real Ghost busters which was fun.

A little samey.

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I abandoned my usual author of first choice, Stephen King, when I chose this book. I have seen the film which is based on this book so I wanted to hear the actual novel itself… Firstly I’ll heap much well deserved praise on the book’s narrator, his was one of the best narrations I’ve heard in quite some time. Sadly IMHO an excellent narrator was somewhat let down (and also possibly hindered) by a novel that I can only describe as very, very slow to gather momentum which then gathered speed, only to go back to chugging along towards its less than exciting end… Or to put it another way, I nearly stopped listening a few chapters into the book but held on hoping it would eventually spark my imagination which thankfully eventually it did. When the excitement narration was approx ten chapters from the novel’s end it seemed to run out of steam and began barely chugging along again. I honestly think that had this book contained even one stand out character that injected a bit more life & possibly more evil, this novel would have had more momentum to carry the listener along (my usually very active and capable imagination received hardly any stimulation. Only a few times did I picture a scene in my head, whereas my imagination is constantly being stimulated when listening to my favourite Stephen King novels being read by Stephen himself…). Overall I’ll award this experience 7 out-of ten based mainly on the narrator’s stirling attempt to inject life into what IMHO is quite a lacklustre novel which could easily have been much more hard to stop listening to, the audio equivalent of being “unputdownable”. Now which Stephen King novel in my collection will I listen to (and experience again…).

A bit of a hard slog…

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