The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

               It’s hard to think of anything worth saying about The Amityville Horror. The work’s notoriety stems largely from the hoax that surrounded its release, as well as... Oh, wait. No. That’s all it’s got going for it. The quality of the writing is among the worst I’ve seen in published material, fiction or non-fiction, and the fact that it’s reached a level of popularity so far beyond anything the story itself deserves can only be a testament to the power of... gullibility? Hope? You tell me. Part of me wants to give it kudos for managing to generate controversy and investigation in the first place. Anson and the Lutzes must have struck some kind of nerve to ever get that far, right? I wonder, though, if they’re not simply the first people with the gall to lie that boldly and in that particular way. Whatever the case, they managed to convince some people for some amount of time, and given how heavily fiction relies on blurring the line between reality and make-believe, there must be something worth exploring in that.

                Even under its initial guise as the recounting of a real event, Amityville presented itself as a story rather than a purely informative work. More importantly, it presented itself as a story intended to scare. Anson’s always sure to pepper an exclamation point or two on top of anything we’re supposed to be astonished or frightened by, and every now and again he indulges his pronoun-starved prose with the poetic flourish of a writer setting a scene. It touts itself as an examination of events, but its identity as a horror story is unmistakable, and for the sake of developing an idea I’m going to assume that it’s a successful one. I’m assuming that the people who read it when it first came out were frightened, and that anyone who’s read this far in my essay is on board with my stance that the story’s pretty crap on a technical level, because doing so allows us to examine a pretty cool dimension of fiction. Amityville’s success as a horror novel in spite of its poor artistic merit illustrates how significant the complementary relationship between a story’s emotional potency and its grounding in reality actually is.

                I complained that The Lovely Bones invested too heavily in establishing a strong sense of reality, and I argued against Professor Johnson’s essay on the inclusion of reality translating to better storytelling, but Amityville’s got me re-examining both of those points. All fiction attempts to produce an emotional reaction from its audience, and because artists have succeeded in doing so through mediums as distant from reality as cartoons and claymation, I’ve never considered maintaining plausibility as being that integral to the artistic process. Something worth keeping an eye on, maybe, but nothing to get hung up over. I think I was wrong. Our reactiveness to the events in a work of fiction is based not only on the value judgments being triggered but on the extent to which the author has tricked us into believing that what we’re reading is true. If the triggered values make up a story's length and width, the sense of reality is what constitutes its depth, multiplying the impact by making it not just something that resonates with us, but by virtue of being more "real" something that threatens to genuinely affect us.

                For the initial readers of The Amityville Horror, then, the shoddy “width” and “length” were experienced in conjunction with incredible “depth”. By simply adding another lie to the long string of lies that make up any work of fiction--by claiming that it was real--Anson could write all the clichés and crappy dialogue he wanted and still impact his audience. I can only imagine how scared they might have been had this one-time-only opportunity fallen into the hands of a more capable author.