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Rosemary's Baby
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - A Great Classic Never Dies
This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I've just put it down and am glad I picked it up in the first place.
It was a very quick, easy read. I finished it in 3 days. I've seen the movie many years ago, so I knew the basics. I really dug the book. Plus, gotta remember that there was nothing like this in '68. Before that was Hitchcock-type horror (Psycho comes to mind), and the usual Dracula/Werewolf/Swamp Thing type monsters. This book made mainstream horror fiction a huge success. Too bad that it also lead to a bunch of rip-offs. So by today's standards this is quite lame. And I'd have to agree with that. A great classic that set the foundation for many horror rip-offs, and the book set the stage for horror fiction for years to come. The book has moments of suspence, though the ending is a bit cheesy.
This is the first book I read by Ira Levin and I look forward to reading more by him. If you've seen the movie but haven't read the book, do yourself a favor and pick this bugger up. It's worth it.
Rating:  - witchy realism
Difficult to put these sorts of things into writing without
either overdoing it--a devil baby born with a tail may be
a bit overdone-- but readers, raised in schools that taught
science and evolution but nothing about witchery beyond the
historic facts of the Salem witch trials, need some physical evidence...
and that's where Ira Levin succeeds in taking this beyond
the scary ghost story that fades away at dawn...
Rating: - amazing condition for the price
I bought this as a used copy for $.16. It arrived in about a week. I'm thrilled to own this classic, especially for such an awesome price. Would buy again from this seller.
Rating: - Good read.
Although I didn't find this book particularly frightening, I enjoyed the story and think it's well above average for the genre. It was well-written and the characters are all very memorable, especially Hutch and the doctor. I thoroughly enjoyed being in Rosemary's world throughout the read. So much so that I rented the DVD & I'm very much looking forward to viewing it tonight.
Rating: - Uncomfortably Good
There are some scenes from film that are so ingrained in your psyche that even if you have not seen a particular movie you feel you know that movie intimately because it has been played over and over through out your lifetime. The scene in which Mia Farrow screams "What have you done to its eyes?...What have you done to him you maniacs?" is one of those scenes from Roman Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby". Having never seen "Rosemary's Baby" I knew very well what the movie was about before I picked-up the book. I found that this knowledge enhanced the experience of Ira Levin's horror classic dealing with the corruption of an innocent woman in the advancement of evil and sin on a biblical scale.
The book itself is a very easy and quick read. Ira Levin chooses his words very carefully and moves the story forward in a minimalist style. The story is told through the eyes (no pun intended) of Rosemary Woodhouse and much of the action, and true plot of the story, is hidden from Rosemary. Therefore, Ira Levin uses a lot of dialogue to communicate to the reader, very subtly, that things are not as they seem. Rosemary may be naive to what is going on but the reader is not. I found this to be a very unsettling technique that added a lot of intrigue to the story. Rosemary is utterly in the dark and the reader is in a grey area: night is turning into dawn, but the reader still can't see clearly.
Of course knowing the plot because of the popularity of the movie, I picked-up on every nuance in the story that clearly signals what is going to happen latter. Knowing the ending in advance was fun because you can see how well structured the story is from the beginning. There are also some very guilty pleasures knowing the climax when you read certain scenes. For instance, when Rosemary is having trouble with the pregnancy and Levin writes "The baby kicked like a demon" or when Guy is hesitant to put his hand of Rosemary's belly to feel the baby kick and she says "It's nothing to be afraid of, It won't bite you." It is these instances when knowing the ending really enhances the novel.
The only problem I did have with a story that is very well executed, is that when Rosemary finally does put all the pieces together in a flurry of understanding that happens in a span of about two pages, she never thinks about the violence perpetrated during conception. That bothered me. For such a violent and horrific experience for Rosemary, she never really questions it much even though she realized it was more than just a dream. I could not get over that. Other than that, I thought the book was very well executed, and was very unsettling.
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