Synopsis:
The Amityville Horror House is demolished, unleashing terror upon the unsuspecting suburban community of North Amityville and its neighboring Village. With the fabled house gone, the two towns begin experiencing an onslaught of unsettling phenomena.
People go missing. A putrid, almost fungal spore-like mold begins festering across lawns. Shadows move and orbs glitter in the night. An unlikely band of characters comes together to battle a supernatural nightmare that threatens to tear all of Long Island apart.
Ottone’s inspired, fresh take on the most famous haunted house in the world is a sprawling supernatural tale of evil as it often comes: where you live, where you sleep.
Review:
I will be forthcoming and tell you now that I am not much of an Amityville man myself, having always preferred the shifting architecture of The House on Ash Tree Lane, or the suffocating dread of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. Robert Ottone however, has turned this skeptic into a believer, breathing electrifying, terrifying life into the place. A startlingly original addition to horror’s best-worst franchise, “Amityville Awakens,” takes the rich parts of what might or mightn’t have happened at 112 Ocean Avenue and its own terrifying lore, creating a deeply moving, action-packed, and most notably, not awful novel (there’s an endorsement). With some existential, Evil-Dead-feeling gloriously gooey and gory passages, burst eyeballs and the like, a really fresh supernatural element with some classic King DNA, and transcendent religious horror, alongside teenage love, a large cast of remarkable characters and a whole lot of charm, I really do think Ottone is one of the coolest and most sincere cats writing horror, and “Amityville Awakens,” backs me up on every count. It’s out from the ever-amazing Clash Books October 6th, and it’s irresistibly entertaining.
The long abandoned blight on North Amityville, and most infamous house in American horror that is 112 Ocean Avenue is at long last coming down. When Pablo Mendez takes a bit of a turn and leaves his bewildered crew there to finish the job, he doesn’t appreciate that he will never see them again, the first discordant note in a symphony of inexplicable and escalating horrors that threaten to consume Amityville from the inside out. With a plague of further disappearances, out of character acts of violence, a strange red-black gunk and a glowing boy- one must consider whether there is any truth to the myths that shrouded the house, and whether they were really confined to its four cursed walls.
For all its supernatural chaos and near apocalyptic horrors, it really is the characters in this novel that make it. Ottone writes confidently between six principal perspectives, and whilst we like these characters to differing degrees, every one has their own fears, failings and history- each feels real. Most notably: Joey is an unwaveringly kind boy who is madly in love with his best friend Terri, nothing short of paralysed by the possibility of what they already have, and incredibly nervous about it. We have Terri, who reciprocates Joey’s feelings, and is also incredibly nervous about it, but equally terrified about the disappearance of her uncle, and the growing tension in her household.
I think the most interesting is Sheriff Meeker though. Whilst the weary, semi-crooked, occasionally immoral law enforcement is a staple of the horror genre, and Meeker is essentially just that, she is written compassionately by Ottone- deeply complex, her struggles reading empathetically as opposed to reduced to caricature-like or archetypal.
We also have Silva, Pablo and Fitzpatrick, each of which contributed something essential to the novel’s widening portrait of Amityville in collapse, and all of whom I enjoyed reading from the perspective of, irrespective of my (deliberately engineered) disdain toward the latter. Ottone does not stop their though, creating three dimensional characters even on the sidelines, such as Pastor Madolyn, Joey’s father, and Krista an addict who Meeker sees on the side, each full of messy, recognisable humanity.
After 68 and counting films, endless books, documentaries and dubious true accounts, sequels, prequels and sidequels, I had long regarded Amityville as haunted only by diminishing returns. “Amityville Awakens,” however, dusts the place off, literally knocks it down and does something amazing with the rubble of it. Inventive and excessive, Ottone’s latest is heartfelt, spectacularly entertaining and horrifying enough to match Trevor Henderson’s gnarly cover. You’ll be wanting this one.
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