Hell House by Richard Matheson
Reading or watching older horror books and movies often feels like an historical exercise to me. Some hold up well, still are scary or disturbing and give insight into fright and the disquiet of the human condition. Others......well others not so much. Some require us to strain against the constraints of time and project our minds back and attempt to understand why a book or movie was scary or frightening at the time it was published. Thusly do we turn our wandering eye towards the consideration of a classic; Hell House by Richard Matheson. Often described in numerous online lists as the haunted house book that ends all haunted house books, personally I will be staying with Haunting of Hill House as my exemplar of the genre. In many ways, the two books are almost parallels of each other like pieces of music with a similar chord but proceeding in a different progression or arrangement. The setup is the classic "Stay in the Haunted House for ...