Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Ah, the 1970s: High inflation! Rising unemployment! Oil crisis! Recession! School desegregation! White flight! High crime! Son of Sam! It was the decade when everything went to hell—and explains why the haunted-house novel reached critical mass. In The Sentinel (1974), a model moves into a brownstone…from hell. In The Shining (1977), an economically strapped family takes a last-chance job in a hotel…from hell. In The House Next Door (1978), nouveau-riche suburbanites build the contemporary home…from hell. But it all started with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), a chilling tale about a family who escapes the city to move into a summer rental…from hell.

Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death. He originally wrote Burnt Offerings as a screenplay, and first intended it to be a black comedy, but as Marasco said in an interview: “It just came out black.” Reviewers panned or patronized it, but the book caught on, sparking the wave of haunted-house novels later in the decade.

If social and political anxiety spawns zombies, then economic anxiety births haunted houses. Marasco created the now-common real estate nightmare scenario: a cash-strapped family (or individual) gets a deal on a place above their socioeconomic station. Hoping to start fresh, they go all-in, quickly realizing that their attempt to buy a better life at a discount is the worst decision they ever made. Now all they can do is run, screaming for their lives, abandoning their investment.

If there’s any doubt that Burnt Offerings is all about the square footage, the first chapter is a long lament by Marian Rolfe, a housewife trapped in her family’s stifling Queens apartment, desperate to escape the city. Her husband, Ben, agrees to look at a summer rental, which turns out to be a decrepit mansion at a bargain price. He takes it despite his better judgment. Deals like that don’t come along every day.

Once they move into the old Allardyce place, the house reshapes the couple into their own worst nightmares. Marian cleans obsessively, hypnotized by the expensive uncared-for antiques. Dear, aging Aunt Elizabeth is sharing their vacation, and although she’s a real live wire at first, she becomes frailer as the story progresses. Ben transforms into the kind of father he never wanted to be, practically raping his wife and nearly drowning his son while bullying him into “being a man.” Their behavior gets worse, but every day the house looks better and better.

What Marian doesn’t realize is that she’s not the owner of this house—she’s its slave. Summer is spent on her knees, waxing floors, dusting frames, repairing damage, letting her family die without batting an eye. To her, cleaning is an act of ownership, but the cruel truth is that the Allardyces had money and she doesn’t and nothing will change that. She can live in their house, she can wax their floors, but she’ll never belong.

Before Marasco, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson had written haunted-house books—The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Hell House (1971) are both genre classics, but neither had a thing to say about money. They were about psychic investigators going to abandoned mansions to figure out how they got so spooky. Marasco and his now-forgotten best seller focused on the real issue for most people with a haunted house: “Can I get my investment back?”

Marasco was the first American writer to bring anxieties about class, mortgages, and equity to the forefront of the haunted-house novel. Both Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1979) and Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) follow his formula: cash-strapped family gets deal on new place and comes to regret it. When you’re stuck with a haunted house, it doesn’t matter how much you put into repairing the boiler or fixing the pool. At the end of the day, all you can do is run.

Credit 81

There Goes the Neighborhood

The ’70s were a time of high interest rates and growing inflation. So, for Americans who’d finally scraped together enough to buy a house, the worst thing imaginable was an icy blast of wind and a satanic voice telling them to “Get out!” Families were moving from the cities to the suburbs and from the suburbs to the sticks, and new homes were popping up everywhere. A brand-new house was more than a place to hang your crucifix; it symbolized a new start, a new life, a new family.

But Americans have always been aware that their homes can be menaced by unseen forces. Perhaps those forces are the ghosts of people murdered there a hundred years before, or maybe it’s toxic waste from a leaky landfill. Maybe demons are stealing your life force, or maybe it’s radiation. Your kids might be sick because your house is built over a cemetery, or the radon in the basement. Large-scale environmental disasters like Love Canal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, and a series of high-profile asbestos lawsuits made clear that invisible evil was hiding in your home. In fact, if the cause was Satan, you were lucky. At least the Lord of Darkness wasn’t a carcinogen.

Despite Jackson’s iconic The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s go-for-broke Hell House, Anne Rivers Siddons’s beautifully disturbing The House Next Door, and even Marasco’s pioneering Burnt Offerings, the unfortunate fact remains that America’s most iconic haunted house is the title property from The Amityville Horror. Crass, commercial minded, grandiose, ridiculous, this carnival barker’s idea of a haunted house is a shame-train of stupid.

Socialite Patricia Montandon hired a tarot reader for a party but forgot to get him a drink. Furious, he cursed her San Francisco apartment. The Intruders is her all-true account of the party snub…from hell. Credit 82

“George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue on December 18. Twenty-eight days later, they fled in terror.” So begins one of the most promiscuous horror franchises of all time, one that spawned at least six novels (all marketed as nonfiction), as well as books by pretty much everyone who ever crossed the property line.

Amityville’s cottage-industry success stems from the fact that George Lutz stuck to his guns all his life, dishing out movie-ready claptrap from one side of his mouth while claiming it was all true from the other. Reportedly never happy with his share of the proceeds from the original best-selling book and movie, Lutz realized that he could still market his name. And so he did, desperately hoping to pad his bank account with sequel after sequel. After sequel.

Credit 83

Many people found the original story of demonic possession, goo flowing down walls, and mysterious voices shouting at priests hard to swallow. Those events pale in comparison to the sequels, with their devil pigs riding on the wings of 747s, attacks by fire bats, and evil forces compelling people to rent cars they don’t even want. The Amityville Horror II (1982) was plenty ridiculous, with archangels working as lifeguards to rescue drowning Lutz children, but in the third installment the story went from a simple meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit. Amityville: The Final Chapter (1985) follows the Lutzes as they ditch their kids and fly around the world on a studio-paid publicity tour, giving interviews to promote the movie. Keeping the franchise going, the Entity (the source of all evil from the first book) goes mobile, following the family everywhere. Fortunately, George Lutz is manly enough to punch and kick it into submission. “I knew this martial arts training would come in handy someday,” he muses. The Final Chapter climaxes in a battle in which George puts the Abomination in a chokehold while his wife and kids form a human chain and channel love power into him. When the Entity finally taps out, the entire family, including Harry the Dog, kick and stomp its corpse into dust.

Credit 84

It’s an inspirational story. “One day,” author Ken Eulo said in an interview, “I read The Amityville Horror and I thought to myself, oh Christ, I could do this in my sleep.” And so he wrote The Brownstone (1980), which spawned two sequels. He wasn’t the only one. Even poor deceased Jay Anson, a jobbing writer brought on board to write the original Amityville book, wasn’t allowed to rest in peace. His 666 (1981), effectively a smudged photocopy of The Amityville Horror, was published under his name a year after he died.

Sadly, the true story of 112 Ocean Avenue turns out to be worse than what’s in the books. The crime that cursed the Amityville House wasn’t the real-life murders of the DeFeo family. Nor was it that the land was supposedly home to John Ketcham, a warlock who escaped the Salem witch trials. Nor was it a violation of fabricated Shinnecock Indian Nation burial grounds. A 2013 documentary (My Amityville Horror) about Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved in, puts a name to the Entity that haunted this house: George Lutz.

George was Kathy Connors’s second husband, and he made it clear he would not invest his time and money in children who didn’t belong to him. George demanded that Kathy’s first husband surrender all parental rights; from then on, he insisted that Daniel and his two siblings call him either “sir” or “Mr. Lutz.” As Daniel said in the documentary, “He’s the biggest asshole you ever could meet.”