The Amityville Curse
Hans Holzer
Tower, 1981
ISBN: 0-505-51676-4
It all started for the Amityville series in 1974 when Ronny DeFeo Jr. killed six members of his family in their house. Luckily he went to prison for his crimes and ended up dying in jail. It’s an incredibly tragic event that somehow kicked off one of the most famous horror franchises. A jam-packed series of books and films, some of them fiction, some of them claiming to be “true stories.”
After the Lutz family moved into the old DeFeo place they were soon set upon paranormal events that got so bad they eventually had to leave their house and flee all them ghosts. Soon after writer Jay Anson got the Lutz family to give him 45 hours of taped recordings that comprised their account of what happened after they purchased the Defeo house. That became the novel The Amityville Horror. Which became The Amityville Horror, the movie. It's one of the most famous “real-life hauntings” ever and has been scrutinized since the beginning. Like all paranormal stuff, maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. I’m just here for the books.
But what it did do is start a sensation, everyone wanted in on that Amityville story. And since it was a “true story” there is no real way to copyright the title and basic idea of a haunted house, so we got plenty of Amityville. That’s why there’s a million low-budget movies that start with Amityville. There were segments on talk shows, news reports, you name it, even consummate grifters Ed and Lorraine Warren went to the house to investigate, as did other paranormal investigators like Hans Holzer.
Hans Holzer was a long time “ghost hunter,” author and television personality by the time The Amityville Horror came along, having started his work in the early sixties. He wrote a lot of books about the paranormal. Some were fact-based, others were straight novels like his Randy Knowles Psychic Detective series and standalones like The Entry. He also was a boot-on-the-ground investigator going all over the place hunting down specters and ghouls and other paranormal phenomena. In Amityville territory he wrote both fact and fiction with his account of the days leading up to the murder, the confession and the trial in the fact-based Murder in Amityville and this, The Amityville Curse which is pure fiction.
The Amityville Curse was published by Tower Books in 1981, Tower was a fairly low-rent publisher that sprung from comics books and “erotic” books. As Belmont-Tower they published Holzer’s previous Amityville book, Murder in Amityville (which was the basis for the second movie Amityville II: The Possession) so it was natural for them to want a follow-up. The Lutz’s story was still big business and almost guaranteed to sell some books.
So, it’s after the Lutz’s moved out and three couples decide that 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island would be a nice place to live and fix up. We know where this goes. What unfolds is a fairly standard haunted house novel with paper-thin characters and writing so loose there were parts I think Holzer forgot what he just had a character to do or say. There’s spooky shenanigans, a mysterious murder, witchcraft, fake-outs, Native American medicine men, special Bibles, marriage problems, trips to New York Occult stores, interchangeable leads and then a rushed out-of-left-field ending that I had to read twice to totally get was Holzer was doing.
With all of that and being at 208 pages with a decently large font size, The Amityville Curse should have flown by, but it was a struggle. It’s a forward heavy book, as if Holzer was making sure he’d get to his agreed word account and then quickly dashed off the end once he knew he was safe. He’s also got an odd newspaper reporter-style which I’m sure comes from his non-fiction. Characters are initially named and then their age given, like “Frank White, Age 29,” though it might have been a ploy to get the reader to wonder if the story did indeed REALLY HAPPEN. It also takes place over months and months and the tension really never ratchets up, there’s no urgency, just a lot of characters waiting to see what else happens and being mildly scared.
All that being said, it does have a certain amount of 80s horror-charm. It reads like a dozen B-Movies and gets appropriately grizzly when need be. If you're a fan of the series, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it more than the average person. Holzer's strengths as a writer probably lay more in the realm of non-fiction, his fiction is both fast and languid. Much like life I suppose. All in all it looks mighty fine on my shelf with my other Amityville books. This also was the basis for the fifth film in the series and even an official Tubi-original remake in 2023. Can’t keep Amityville down.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.