This past week have been re-reading “The Amityville Horror” … the first horror novel I ever read. Amazing how time (and age) can chage your perspective on certain things. I first read this book when I was about 11 or 12 years old and it scared the shit out of me. This book is one of the reasons that I love “horror” so much. So, I must confess that I am disappointed to find out just how overdone and silly the writing is and just how ludicrous the “actual events” that take place are. I love a good ghost story and I hate that this one hasn’t stood the test of time. And, no. I don’t believe that anything described in the book ever happened (except that the Lutz family did live in the house briefly).

But, no matter how scary “The Amityville Horror” was the first time I read it … it never equaled the shock to the system that Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” gave me just a few years later.