Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin | 1967 | Pegasus Books | Paperback $16
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and mostly elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building, and despite Rosemary’s reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband takes a shine to them.
Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant — and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castavets’ circle is not what it seems . . . .
I have to admit, I read this book purely as an excuse to re-watch the classic horror movie based on it. And I wouldn’t have expected to say this, because I usually have a clear preference for one or the other, but — I was pleasantly surprised to find that I fully enjoyed both the film and the book.
The funny thing is that I felt like the source of horror in the book was different from that of the film. The growth of the sense of horror is basically the same, like a creeping feeling that things aren’t quite right and that something evil is going to happen. But the things that cause that feeling are different.
In the movie, I felt a sympathetic connection to the main character. She’s a young woman who just wants to find a nice little home and start a nice little family and things start to go very badly for her. In her naïveté she lets it start to happen and then can’t stop it. The horror is that she ultimately can’t escape the evil that has been building up, that her own body has been unwittingly building up, and in the end she has to confront that evil.
In the book, the horror of “hysteria” seems like almost as much of a concern as the evil itself at first — the fear of not getting her imagined nice little home and nice little family seeming to outweigh the main character’s concerns until it’s too late… and then having that horror realized when she tries to escape and is, indeed, accused of hysteria. The ultimate horror is that in the end, beyond just confronting the evil that her own body brought forth, she accepts it.
I don’t always enjoy horror books. They too often either give me nightmares or are so silly that I don’t find them scary at all. Reading one that is engaging without being either too terrifying or too melodramatic has been a real treat.
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Publication information: Levin, Ira. Rosemary’s baby. New York, NW: Pegasus Books, 2017. Paperback.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
