Hell House

- Hell House. Richard Matheson. Four "paranormal investigators" -- Dr. Barrett and wife Edith, evangelist Florence and former wonder child Fischer --are given a strange assignment by a surly, dying millionaire: To spend one week at Belasco House, often called the Mt. Everest of haunted houses, or more famously Hell House, and determine once and for all whether there is indeed life after death. For Barrett and Florence, this is a golden opportunity to prove their respective, and clashing, beliefs completely. For Edith, it is a trap waiting to destroy her. And for Fischer it's coming back to the house that killed his companions twenty years ago and left him babbling on the doorstep. None of them are ready for the many nasty surprises Hell House has in store for them...

A highly influential work from an already essential genre writer, Matheson being the author of "I am Legend", "A stir of echoes", "Bid time return", "What dreams may come" and several famous short stories such as "Nightmare at 20,000 feet", "Duel", and so many stories that became classic episodes of The Twilight Zone. But Hell House is also one of the most over-the-top haunted house novels you will ever read, so excessive and loud it almost descends into self-parody at times. 

Does this mean it's a bad novel? Not quite. It's been argued that this book feels like Matheson's answer to Shirley Jackson's essential "The Haunting of Hill House" (the cast is superficially similar, down to the mysterious, almost ethereal couple in charge of our heroes' meals. Both houses share a similar nickname as well as a vaguely similar architecture, there are several direct callbacks...) --but unlike, say, Lovecraft writing "At the mountains of madness" as a pseudo-sequel (and more or less fanfic) of Allan Poe's "The narrative of A. Gordon Pym", Matheson seems to want to "masculinize" what he surely perceived as an intimately "feminine" novel. 

The contrast almost reads like comparing Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman. So like them, where Jackson whispers and intimates, Matheson shouts and bombards. Hill House was haunted by subtle, ethereal, barely-seen apparitions. Hell House is haunted by very physical, VERY horny ghosts that loudly state their desires. Where Jackson hints at sexual repression between all four researchers, Matheson makes that sexual repression the very crux of their downfall and, ultimately, the source of the haunting. 

The result is a raucous, very dated novel that displays the author's issues so nakedly it's rather unpleasant at times --yet remains an ultimately satisfying read for genre fans. It's quite influential on late twentieth-century horror for a reason, after all.