The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
Published 1978 · 315 pages · 86,625 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Horror
How hard is The Amityville Horror to read?
The Amityville Horror scores 23 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Anson writes in plain, reportorial language with everyday words for sewing rooms, basements and flies. It sits close to Beach Read in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 24 out of 100
- Sentences are short and declarative, stacking incidents like a case file. Nothing demands rereading.
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Fear lives in concrete objects: slime, cold spots, a swarm of flies, a red room. The book never leaves the physical house.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- Episodes follow each other briskly, day by day, with little background beyond the DeFeo murders. A reader tracks them easily.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Events are stated outright and the narrator reports each fright without leaving gaps. Little needs inferring beyond whether the claims are real.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The house, the flies and the 3:15 hour carry obvious menace. Symbols are signposted, much like the allegory of 1984.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The text presents itself as sincere testimony. Any irony comes from the gap between its factual claims and later doubts.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The family flees and the haunting is declared real, which gives closure, though the epilogue leaves the house's fate and truth open.
- Structural complexity: 14 out of 100
- A linear 28-day chronology with no shifts in point of view.
How The Amityville Horror is regarded
The Amityville Horror holds a literary regard score of 35 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.