Hell House

Hell House by Richard Matheson
Published: 1971
Narrated by: Ray Porter
Length: 09:11 (301 pages)

I loved I Am Legend (side note: it’s crazy that I can now link to books I read almost nine years ago). The direction it took surprised me, and it has one of my favourite endings of any novel. The way it wraps everything up and manages to completely flip the reader’s understanding of the plot on its head is really a thing of beauty. This novel didn’t live up to that.

The setup for Hell House is quite good, I thought. A group of paranormal investigators have travelled to Hell House to try to understand the reported phenomenon and, if it exists, potentially cleanse the house of any lingering energy. They are brought there by an eccentric millionaire under the condition that they spend a week in the house. If they do so, they will each receive $10,000. The group is led by a physicist who believes in energy but is skeptical of conscious supernatural entities, his wife who assists him in his work, and two mediums. The first medium is a man who, thirty years prior, was part of another Hell House investigation that ended with everyone on the team dying but him. The other medium is a woman who wants to find the spirits in need and assist them in passing through to the other side.

The house was once owned by a man named Emeric Belasco. He was evil from an early age, killing a cat and sexually assaulting his sister before he was even a teenager. After his parents died, he inherited their wealth and decided to recreate his own 120 Days of Sodom as a social experiment. He brought people to live in the house and hosted wild orgies, inviting them to commit as many acts of debauchery as possible. The participants eventually lose all inhibition and morality. Sex is apparently a gateway drug, and they move on to murder and torture, eventually even resorting to cannibalism and necrophilia. They begin completely neglecting their own bodily needs, focusing only on instant pleasure. They stop cleaning, stop eating, and someone eventually enters the house to find twenty-seven of them frozen and starved to death.

Richard Matheson’s writing can be absolutely riveting. The concept of a group of people staying in a haunted house was, I think, a well-established trope even when this was published, but the inclusion of the horrific backstory at the start of the novel really added to the unsettling atmosphere. Each character offered something interesting, and I was excited to see where this would go.

Unfortunately, the more the hauntings picked up, the less thrilling the book became. I actually found myself laughing out loud at a couple of moments, something I don’t really even do when reading comedy. It tries incredibly hard to be extreme and when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. There are some cringe-worthy moments in this. At times, it felt like a porn parody of The Haunting of Hill House.

When he tries to come up with moments of horror and shock, he continually just falls back on rape. Almost everything horrific that happens in this book is sexual violence towards women. When the spirits aren’t raping, they’re doing what is apparently the next most horrific thing possible – turning people gay!

The shock-factor became one-note and starting to read like a self-indulgent fantasy, which made the last half of the book a bit dull. However, his writing, while not always amazing, is incredibly readable, and I still found myself flying through this. I listened to the audiobook, and Ray Porter did a fantastic job. It must have been quite a struggle to get through some of these passages without cracking up.

This does have the honour of being the first book I’ve read that has the phrase “holy, burning jism” in it. Or possibly even just “jism”?