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 X amount of time and get Y amounts of money.....if you survive." Hell House begins with a variation on the theme because all of the members of the party gathered to stay in said house are already believers of the paranormal. Usually there's at least one person who is the control, the contrarian who rejects the "supernormal" and skeptically refutes the happenings in the house until it is too late and they are consumed by their own refusal to believe in what they can't understand or see themselves. Matheson does do something interesting by allowing all of his characters to indeed believe in psychic phenomena, but then gives them differing beliefs in the causes of said phenomena. I liked this initial set up and found it refreshing to start, but do feel that the author didn't do a good enough job introducing the differences between the varying schools of psychic research or ability. What is the difference between physical and mental mediums? I'm still not sure. I don't know if this was just common knowledge back in 1971 when the book was originally published, but as a somewhat well read person I'm not sure about it in 2023. 

    I feel like most of the terror and shock ascribed to Hell House is mostly due to the bluntness and forwardness of the sexual content of the book. Classics do sometimes suffer from setting a baseline and then having other authors and artists use that as a starting point to then move their own works forward. parts of Hell House was indeed disturbing and graphic, but it basically felt akin to an episode or two of American Horror Story albeit a stepped-up HBO version. Honestly, out of the entire book the only part that actually scared me and put me on edge was when Fisher initially opened himself up to feel around with his abilities and had to rush back to defend his mind as the House attacked him. And indeed, let it be said that the sexual violence against women in Hell House is borderline snuff film exploitative for exploitation's sake. 

    I'm definitely going to give more of Matheson's books and stories a try, especially A Stir of Echoes and I Am Legend, but Hell House doesn't get on my recommendation list unless you are looking specifically for influential classics regardless of their own standalone merit. There are too many other books to read that have done more interesting and scary things in the last fifty years. Go read Adam Nevill instead. 

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