Hell House by Richard Matheson

“Get out of the house!”

That’s what my wife kept saying as she read the seminal haunted house novel, Hell House by Richard Matheson.

My wife, who would be the first to admit she isn’t a “reader,” has somehow rocketed ahead of me on my reading list. So much so, that I had to get her a book NOT on my list so I could catch up.

So, when I finally did start reading it, I wasn’t terribly surprised when I found myself uttering he same, “get out of the house!”

As the second book in my “Readings in the Genre” class, Hell House took the same tropes as Haunting of Hill House, and, in the words of Spinal Tap, turned them up to 11.

Whereas Hill House lit the impossibly long fuse of a psychological horror and let the reader meander through, Hell House presented more of a pack of fire crackers in a bucket. This kept me on edge for a good portion of the book but…

Matheson seems to have written this book more out of curiosity of his own abilities to tell a ghost story than a desire to tell a good haunting story. The premise starts out as so many of these stories do: deranged rich guy establishes a house of debauchery and wallows in the blood and semen that oozes from the result. So, that drew me in. Of course, horrible things happen, resulting in a dangerous haunting. Then, he throws in some “sensitive” types to get to the bottom of it for another rich dude, who is on the cusp of dying. So, let’s check our shopping list of tropes to make sure Matheson got them all:

Eccentric, evil rich guy? Check.

House of debauchery? It’s there!

Horrible deaths occurring there? Of course!

Troubled medium out to set right what he once did wrong? Two of them!

Shunned academic out to prove his theories and be accepted as a serious scientist? He’s even disabled!

The book is 46 years old. I understand that some of these ideas were new at the time, and it’s a shame that they’ve been watered down by overuse over the years. Matheson does a fine job with them, and his character development is top notch. In fact, the relationship between Dr. Lionel Barret and his wife Edith, and their struggles, felt very real to me. What didn’t feel real to me was how his impotence didn’t come into play until halfway through the book, as if it were nothing more than a simple plot device. It could have been mentioned earlier, because it really is an important piece of the puzzle. As is the age of his wife, who I couldn’t help but feel was much older than she later (also halfway through) turned out to be.

Benjamin Franklin Fischer, the sole survivor of an earlier attempt to clean Hell House, is less defined, though Matheson tries his damnedest to connect us with him. He’s just such a generic character. Child prodigy-turned-jaded-adult is so common, that I feel it deserves its own genre. I’ll call it, “child prodigy-turned-jaded-adult horror.”

Let’s not forget the beautiful ex-actress-turned medium. Because, really, who better to throw into the maw of a sex-crazed house than a gorgeous celebrity. It really did seem like a good idea at the time. Oh, and she’s religious, a spiritualist; Out to hug all the ghosts with her Native American spirit guide Red Cloud. Beautiful former actress + medium + religion + Native American spirit guide = one helluva confused character. She should be nuanced, but she isn’t. When she died, I imagined Red Cloud on the side of the freeway with a single tear.

Remember the Dudleys from House on Haunted Hill? Of course you do. They’re back! This time they’re nameless and much less talkative. They survive, so I’m sure they’ll show up in another book. They’re my new favorite cameo couple.

Let’s get back to Lionel and Edith. She’s young; he’s old. She has daddy issues; he has polio issues. Madcap zaniness ensues. She married him because sex wasn’t really a possibility with his polio-induced impotence. So what could possibly go wrong in a HOUSE BUILT TO HOLD BLOOD ORGIES?

A lot, it seems.

So, I’ve touched a lot on the tropes used by Matheson, and they were probably somewhat fresh at the time. Like, if they were bananas, the greasy black spots were just forming. What I really didn’t enjoy about the book was the slap-shod writing.

That’s a hard thing for me to say when he’s the guy behind classics like What Dreams May Come and A Stir of Echoes. There were points of the story where his sentence structure was so repetitive, I felt like I was reading a nightmarish Dick and Jane book. These moments came at the most inopportune time, when the action was heated and the writing should be doing everything in its power to keep you in the moment. Instead, it does the opposite: it reminded me I was reading. Ugh, I hate that. If I wanted to realize I was reading, I’d pick up literary books. I’m a genre writer, my job is to trick people into reading against their will. I have a basement full of people who, if they’d only read, would be let out.

If it seems like I’m overly critical of this book, it’s only because it was so damned good, but had very notable weaknesses. Overall, seventy-five percent of the book was good. I enjoyed it and would recommend it. I would have enjoyed seeing the “other” ghosts who haunted the house a bit more, as well as more of the horrible things that occurred there. Matheson took risqué subject matters and, at the beginning at least, looked like he was going to exploit their horrors. But he backed off throughout.

There was enough going on, however, that I kept asking myself why they were all staying. Sure, they each had their own reasons, but only the Dr. and Mrs. Barretts' reasons were compelling.

That's why we wanted them to "get out of the house!"