Where to even start? First, I find the title to be a bit misleading. Not wrong, exactly, but misleading. My version was three books in one. Fact & Fiction makes it sound as though they're going to go through each legend/story about the house and land and tell us what's accurate, what's embellished, and what's entirely made up. Not so. It's called Fact & Fiction simply because one of the books is nonfiction, Hozler's investigation into the DeFeo murders themselves, and the other two books are fiction. The books are entertaining, though I personally found the first one about the DeFeo murders to be the most interesting and fun to read, but there are still some pretty glaring problems.

I find it hard to believe that this book had an editor other than the author himself, simply because there are so many grammatical errors involved. Just a few would be one thing, but I found so many that it became a bit distracting.

In the fictional books, Holzer seems to forget some of his timeline and events because there are quite a few contradictions even just a page or two after they happen. Also in the fictional books, the I found to the characters to be highly stupid and lacking in even the slightest common sense even if in mundane matters. Who in the world would see a person pointing a gun at them in their home and think, "oh well, I must be hallucinating?" Sure, your first thought might not be "omg a ghost!" but it sure as heck would probably be something like, "omg an intruder!" instead. Their reaction to it isn't my problem, so much as their thought process and logic.

Also, any answers we get to tie up events tend to be vague and make no sense if you think about them for two seconds. Not even skeptically speaking, but just they make no sense for the characters /themselves/.

And to wrap it all up, there's a ritual scene near the very end of the book where sex takes place, but I find it really hard to consider the sex to be consensual. It felt more like the woman was tricked into it and decided to go along with it at the last minute because she'd already promised and the man who'd tricked her into it was hot. He didn't tell her until the last possible second that the ritual involved sex, but he had no problem making her promise to go through with "the willing and symbolic sacrifice" right from the start. Coercion is not consent.

In addition to ALL of that, I think it seems at best to be culturally insensitive to Native Americans.

That said, despite all of that, it can be an entertaining read so long as you don't expect too much out of it once you realize what it is but I probably wouldn't recommend it. ( )