Book Review: "Rosemary's Baby" by Ira Levin

This story is one that I would imagine that most people are at least partially familiar with because it was a scary thing for most people to ponder even in the 80's when I was a kid. The book and subsequent film probably resulted in a rather massive drop-off in popularity for the name "Rosemary."

I do not have access to most paper books even though I prefer them. So I am doing most of my reading on my 2nd generation Kindle that I can't believe is still going strong to this day. The back button doesn't work and the screen is kind of worn down where you would normally touch to advance the page, but other than that, I would say it is tip top.

tl;dr

I'll drop the tl;dr right at the start: This is a very good, very readable, easy-to-understand, page-turner of a book that even casual readers can probably easily make it through in just a couple days. An avid reader could easily conquer this exciting mountain in a single sitting.

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The above is the first edition which was published in 1968. If you happen to have a first edition don't get too excited because mint-condition first-editions are only worth about $100. Slightly knocked around 1st editions normally go for about $20 so you may as well keep it in your library. Signed ones on the other hand, are very valuable especially since Ira Levin's death in 2007.

Some would argue that Rosemary's Baby is the novel that really put Ira Levin on the map and secured his rank as a top author and he and a handful of others are attributed with starting what is often called the "horror boom." I know I pick on Stephen King a lot because I think he was "spent" a long time ago but had it not been for people like Ira here, I suppose there is at least a bit of a chance that King might not have ever written "Carrie" and taken the horror novelist world by storm.

Ira Levin writes a different kind of horror and it doesn't necessarily involve monsters per-se. What he does is invoke a sense of dread and involves far more realistic and seemingly possible scenarios into his stories (well, the two I have read) and to me, this makes them far more frightening than werewolves, vampires, or other creatures of fantasy.

In Rosemary's Baby we are at first presented with what seems to be a completely normal young couple that is struggling with the normal things in life that all young couples do such as getting by financially, making and keeping good friends, balancing their own separate families as well. Rosemary doesn't work and her husband "Guy" is a struggling actor in New York City.

One day they are offered the opportunity to move into a building that is seen as being quite luxurious but has a checkered past of bad occurrences happening there. The history of the Bramford building is largely seen as myth, but as we experience as the story unfolds, the bad reputation that this building has is more real than fiction, but not for the reasons that people mostly think.

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Things start to go well for the couple but then as time passes Rosemary starts to suspect that there is some nefarious reasons for their good fortune and it unravels in wonderful yet not-too-wordy detail as the novel unfolds.

I don't want to spoil the details so I will instead just focus on the styles that make this a great read.

The book is less than 300 pages but it depends on which edition of it you end up with - there are many.

The chapters are short, Levin doesn't go into superfluous descriptions for the sake of making his book "Stephen King length" and there aren't a million character to remember. I don't have the best memory but I managed to keep tabs on all the characters because other than a few outliers, Levin doesn't introduce a dozen characters that don't have any impact on the story. I can't stand it when authors do this as it tends to make my mind wander and I am not going to read a book if I have to take notes in order to understand it.

This is not the case with Rosemary's Baby.

It was a page turner and on night number one of reading it, it kept me up later than my bedtime because I already knew that "just another chapter" was only going to take 10 minutes or so. By the end of the 2nd night, I had completed the book and am now looking forward to watching the film which I am sure is not as good as the book is.

I don't really feel as though there is any sort of hidden, implied, or even direct lesson to be learned from this. I don't think Levin was trying to warn us about anything. I just think he was trying to entertain and in my mind, he accomplished this goal. Seeing as how it was the best-selling horror book of the 60's, I believe there are a lot of people that would agree with this sentiment.

_{Nadi (my dog) doesn't normally enjoy posing for pictures but she has become a regular "model" for the books I read... before you ask the answer is yes, she did receive a treat for her patience}

I would imagine that Rosemary's Baby is available in every single library in America and also others around the world. I tore through it in just a few days and I believe that most other people that enjoy reading but don't have amazing attention spans like myself, will experience the same