Roger and Carolyn Perron purchased the home of their dreams and eventual nightmares in December of 1970. The Arnold Estate, located just beyond the village of Harrisville, Rhode Island seemed the idyllic setting in which to raise a family. The couple unwittingly moved their five young daughters into the ancient and mysterious farmhouse. Secrets were kept and then revealed within a space shared by mortal and immortal alike. Time suddenly became irrelevant; fractured by spirits making their presence known then dispersing into the ether. The house is a portal to the past and a passage to the future. This is a sacred story of spiritual enlightenment, told some thirty years hence. The family is now somewhat less reticent to divulge a closely-guarded experience. Their odyssey is chronicled by the eldest sibling and is an unabridged account of a supernatural excursion. Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated this haunting in a futile attempt to intervene on their behalf. They consider the Perron family saga to be one of the most compelling and significant of a famously ghost-storied career as paranormal researchers. During a s ance gone horribly wrong, they unleashed an unholy hostess; the spirit called Bathsheba...a God-forsaken soul. Perceiving herself to be mistress of the house, she did not appreciate the competition. Carolyn had long been under siege; overt threats issued in the form of fire...a mother's greatest fear. It transformed the woman in unimaginable ways. After nearly a decade the family left a once beloved home behind though it will never leave them, as each remains haunted by a memory. This tale is an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit on a pathway of discovery: an eternal journey for the living and the dead
First off let us start with a disclaimer: Yes I am reading volume one and two. Yes this book was OBVIOUSLY self published and in desperate need of an editor. Yes this is the book that the movie The Conjuring is based on and Yes I do believe is ghosts. So going into this review I am giving Andrea and her family the benefit of the doubt that all their experiences are true and honest.
This book was not good, I am only giving it two angels because the author did manage to catch how her sisters and parents felt living in their house and how horrifying some of their experiences were, Andrea manages to tell the story from the POV of all of her family members and catch their personalities enough that I could feel empathy for them and relate to them.
1) This book was almost five hundred pages long and there is a whole other volume to go. This entire volume could easily have been 150 pages.
2) The purple prose in this novel was beyond ridiculous. Quote from page eight An astral convergence began as a Universal Plan began spinning in perpetual motion, stirring up the cosmos. And this phrase was simply about the events that led to them buying their farm house.
3) More than half of this novel I spent thinking, "OMG Get to the friggin POINT!" The author goes off on tangents that were totally irrelevant to the telling of the story. Full of pointless drivel, that I am sure is important to her family, but not to the reader. I found myself skimming through pages and pages of nothing. Six pages here about crows, ten pages devoted to the depressing anecdote of the death of a friend, ten pages there simply talking about how the light differs in each room of their house. Another twenty pages thrown in about Andrea trying to find religion.
4) The passage of time in this book is weird, even after finishing it I cannot truly tell how much time passed from the first chapter to the last, the author jumps around a lot.
5) This book was FULL of repetitiveness, the same tales told from different view points, the same phrases used again and again, like Andrea forgets she has already written about a ghostly encounter so she just threw it in somewhere else to make sure.
6) There is a disturbing scene about bats that pissed me off. They flew down the chimney, they didn't bite anyone, they were not rabid and the author tells with glee how they used tennis rackets to kill them.
7) Towards the end the novel began to feel very preachy.
8) I hope it changes but MAN the author makes her own dad out to be a total dick in this book, there is NOTHING sympathetic about him. Roger is almost as much a bad guy as the ghosts are.
9) The chapter headings were weird, the writing style was off putting and there were quotes and poems all over the place that I GUESS were supposed to link up with the story but just felt added on in random. Plus I swear to the dark goddess she used the word "boo" twenty + times.
10) The story couldn't even have ended decently, you know a big climax TO BE CONTINUED, no it ended philosophically with a boring old "this was only the beginning."