Overall, I'd have to say Mercado's account of what happened to her and her family in the old house read as more believable to me as compared to what happened in The Amityville Horror (walls with green slime, the freaky talking pig, the fact that no neighbors heard the shotgun during the DeFeo murders)...Mercado's story is quiet in comparison with its restless spirits, balls of light, occasional strange noises, and misty apparitions. The history of the house further serves as an interesting plot development as we learn more about the spirits that are still trapped in the home with Mercado's family.
Merado's writing is very different than Anson's. She takes the time to explain everything she felt and remembered to the readers. Anson's style lent itself more to making the kinds of connections and expressions we typically see in fictional novels. Mercado is open and honest, lets the reader into the conversations she had with her daughters, ex-husband, brother, and other family, friends, and neighbors, and talks about her reactions without reservation. Throughout the novel and in the epilogue her words feel genuine. She wants the reader to know her fears and gives great detail behind why she wrote this book in the first place. I've never experienced a personal haunting, but at the end book I believed Mercado's story, and I believe she tried with all she has to convey the accuracy of her memories regarding the haunting.
This, unlike how The Amityville Horror comes across, is not a book to impress, but a book to inform.
Happy Hauntings,
Sara
I love how you summarize Grave's End as a book to inform rather than impress. Because of this, I actually was impressed by the "realness" of the book. I accepted Amityville as a farce, but Grave's End read like this could have happened. This "what if?" possibility is what made the book work, despite it not being the most elegantly written.
ReplyDeleteI also love that you say this is a book to inform and not impress. I feel like Amityville went out of the way to be entertaining and failed miserably by trying so hard and here I just wanted to comfort Elaine and I didn't have a problem believing that these things did happen to her family. Grave's End just feels like Elaine is sitting me down and telling me face to face everything that happened to her and I'm feeling all of her emotions with her.
ReplyDeleteI also believed Grave's End to be a lot more realistic than the Amityville Horror because of the same things you mentioned, like the green slime and the pig and the shotgun. It all just seemed like too much. Though, for me, the floating lights in Grave's End were a bit unbelievable. Given this story is actually fairly realistic, I'm pretty sure that the lights really happened and would be a normal part of a haunting. I thought Elaine's reactions were extremely realistic, where she talked about how sometimes, the hauntings would lighten up just enough for them to believe that maybe things would be okay, and then they'd increase in frequency and start all over again. It was the uncertain and unpredictability of the haunting that really sold this as a true story to me. I also felt sad for the ghosts once their story was told, and happy that things worked out the way they did.
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