Gordon McGill - Amityville 3-D

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Gordon McGill - Amityville 3-D (Futura, 1984)

Blurb:

EVIL NEVER DIES...

When John Baxter falls in love with the house at 112 Ocean Street, Amityville, he is not impressed by the tales of horror that come with it.

That is his first mistake.

His second mistake is to ignore the warnings: the bizarre 'accidents' to those around him, the sudden plunging into darkness, the freezing wind, the
mysterious photographs. Nothing can convince him.

Until the hand of death reaches out to touch his loved one. And suddenly he is caught up in the terror and anguish that every occupant of that
house has known - cursed forever, never to be free.

We begin with a seance at the Amityville house where, with a little help from two concealed assistants, the Caswells successfully manifest the dead son of John Baxter and his grieving wife. Unfortunately for these charlatans, no such little boy ever existed: Baxter an investigative reporter and hotshot photographer Melanie are in the employ of Witness Magazine and not to be fooled by a wobbly cardboard child. Trevor Sanders, owner of the Amityville house and complicit in the bogus psychics' deception, offers Baxter the property on minimal terms just so long as his name is kept out of the exposé. Baxter, currently formalising his divorce and looking for a home, readily accepts. Melanie isn't best pleased as, despite the clowning of the Caswells, she really did feel the evil presence of something abroad in the famously haunted house. When the photographs she took for the article are developed, something inexplicable has happened to each image of Sanders who comes out blurred and ghostly every time ....

Delighted to have finally got shot of the old dump, Sanders drives over to the Amityville house singing "What a difference a day makes" but there's no sign of Baxter. Frightened his client has thought better of making home of a property with such a terrible history, Sanders searches the upstairs landing as he's sure he heard footsteps in one of the rooms. He enters .... and is suffocated by a billion-strong swarm of kamikaze flies ....

Which brings us up to the p.50 (of 159) mark ...

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"Did you know," said Lisa, touching the back of her father's chair, "that you can have sex with a ghost? ... I've been reading about it. It's happened to a lot of women. They all say it's fantastic ... Maybe that's why your father bought the house, Huh? Maybe he's got some sex-starved ghost with enormous boobs in the attic."

Baxter arrives just in time to catch Sanders' death throes, but, being a confirmed sceptic, refuses to find any significance in the episode even when Melanie produces the creepy photo's. To celebrate having such a nice new house he decides to quit his job and write a book.

Baxter visits a publisher who accepts his novel with the minimum of fuss despite the fact that he's yet to write even one word of it. He can't wait to get back to Ocean Street to tell Melanie who he's invited over for dinner. Trouble is, he gets mysteriously trapped in a wildly malfunctioning lift and, while she's waiting for him, Mel is pinned to the wall by a freak indoor storm and her eyeballs are frozen under layers of ice. Bax reaches her just in time, but she hardly talks to him after that and even when she does, it's mostly in a baby voice.

Susan, Baxter's sixteen-year-old daughter, is dragged along to the house by her man-hungry best friend, Lisa, who fancies her Dad (Lisa recently "did it" with Jeff so she's keen to show virginal Susan what a woman of the world she is). Lisa starts acting all strange and possessed, gives us a handy potted-history of the house and all the terrible incidents that have taken place there since it was built, but fortunately Baxter turns up before she can get too carried away. The girls return home unharmed, leaving him to cope with a mischievous poltergeist who shifts all his stuff around so he can't concentrate on his writing. He hits the Bourbon. Alcoholism beckons, I'll wager.

Melanie, having spent an evening with four paperbacks telling the story of the Amityville murders, realises that the house has something dreadful planned for Baxter, but as she drives to the rescue a big fat fly finds its way into her car and an Omen-style sadistic creative death takes care of the situation from there.

Fifty pages to go. That latest death perked things up some, i don't mind telling you. McGill's doing a decent job up to now.

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conclusion;

Flies, ice, glass and flame ....

Knowing that John is away for the evening, Lisa drags Susan, Jeff and Roger over to the house for a late night seance. The spirit obligingly spells out 'SUSAN' and 'DANGER' so they sensibly take a boat out on the lake. Susan falls over the edge and drowns.

Nancy, who has arrived unexpected to try and talk sense into her ex-husband, refuses to believe her beloved daughter is gone - she only just saw her walk upstairs, admittedly soaked through and trailing weeds ...

At the funeral, Dr. Elliot West of the Witness stable leans on John to allow a thorough paranormal investigation of the Amityville house (they've not done so in the previous novels?). He eventually agrees, but only if it takes place immediately. A crack team are assembled on the fly and lorry-loads of state-of-the-art equipment arrive ... but the ghoul patrol's hardware is a weapon the evil spirits can use against them.

The deaths come thick and fast. Who will survive The Amityville Horror in 3D?