Series: Rosemary’s Baby – Book 1
Author: Ira Levin
No of Pages: 308
Release Date: 12 March 1967
She is a housewife – young, healthy, blissfully happy. He is an actor – charismatic and ambitious. The spacious, sun-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is their dream home – a dream that turns into an unspeakable nightmare...
Enter the chilling world of Ira Levin – where terror is as near as your new neighbours...and where evil wears the most innocent face of all...
My Thoughts:
Rosemary’s Baby has apparently left people unable to sleep at night. I laughed.
Rosemary and her husband Guy have just moved into a new apartment in a “haunted” building. Newly married and ready to take on the world the couple ignore the warnings of a friend and settle into their new home.
Rosemary soon falls pregnant and it’s then that things start to get odd. Her doctor won’t treat her pain and the odd neighbours from down the hall are constantly bringing her drinks that make her feel sick.
Rosemary was a naive character but understandably so. She was a young housewife who always turned to Guy to find out what to do in situations. After she fell pregnant though and realised something was wrong and Guy wasn’t helping her in the way he should have been she finally came into herself and believed in her ability to do something about her situation. In the end my heart was aching for Rosemary because she got into one of those situations where you can’t turn to anyone for help, no one to trust and not too sure of her own sanity.
Guy I didn’t like from the beginning. He is a self-absorbed actor that came across as one of those people that believe women should be seen and not heard. No matter what concerns Rosemary brought to him about her pregnancy he just brushed her off and told her to trust people that they barely knew. For me he was the most evil character in the entire story because he was Rosemary’s husband and the one she should have been able to trust, and yet he was never ever there for her.
Rosemary’s Baby is very intriguing in its pull. Constantly you are wondering if Rosemary is sane or not. She ends up believing that she has the devils spawn inside of her and really, how plausible is that. Levin wrote the suspense very well in the sense that you don’t know until the very end if Rosemary is indeed right in her suspicions. You are constantly second guessing yourself.
What I didn’t like was the ending; it was silly and felt too abrupt. Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t scary either, it was suspenseful, but not in a way that you absolutely had to know how it ended. You could kind of guess but what if you were wrong. The only reason I finished it was because I wanted to make sure that I was right.
As for being one of the scariest books of all time. It didn’t leave me having nightmares or being scared of my weird neighbours. If anything it just added to my mistrust of humans.
Son of Rosemary
