I was so pumped to begin this book.  It’s held up as a must read and I was excited but I was quickly disappointed. 

Author suffers from “breasted boobily” syndrome while writing women and uses sexual violence against them as a (ineffective) shock factor. This might be something I could overlook if the female characters were at least written well but they give me the impression that Matheson had never conversed with a real life woman and was relying solely on the (poor) representations in 70s television and media. 

Despite the fact that the background of the house suggests violence would affect men and women equally, the men are somehow spared the degradation and humiliation to which the women are submitted.

Even this could be forgiven if the book was actually scary. But it was so blatant and lacking in subtlety, the moments of haunted activity so on the nose that it wasn’t even a “this is spooky and it’s fun” feeling. 

I gave this 2 stars because the writing skill (not the plot or characterization) was good enough to keep me reading. 

It was written well. The premise was fine. The pacing was fine. It wasn’t scary. It really was just like a man read the haunting of hill house and got pissed off that it was a sapphic tale of love and repression and decided he was gonna rewrite it with sex and drugs and shock. But even the most shocking thing wasn’t shocking. Nothing was nearly as scary as the hand holding in the dark in hill house. Nothing was nearly as shocking as the unseen terror of Theodora in the woods. It just…didn’t hit…and all the sexual assault and punishing of women for existing and therefor being inherently sexual and asking for it…gave off bad vibes but not in the way a horror novel should.

70s sexual objectification lol

The scariest thing about this book was when my sky light window decided to smash as I was reading it and I dismissed as it being my overactive imagination deciding to spice up this boring book, while I was in a dark house by myself. Yeah, it was the only inside panel so spooky.

This book is from 1970 and apparently being lesbian was the scariest thing possible. Or this was written by a man who wants to fetish woman so it's just someone being sexually oppressed. This book is compared to Shirley Jackson beautiful novel, however, they not that similar except both have a group of four people investigating ghosts. Also, lesbians. One makes me want to dig up a body, just to disrespect it, in the way the author disrespects women. This novel falls into "Men should be banned from writing horror" camp. I found the writing of the women very annoying especially as the men were not sexually haunted. 

Disability is treated interestingly here and interesting, I mean it's definitely has ableism. A slur even and disrespectful to intersex people. 

Surprise, we have a disabled villain reveal at the end that rises several questions for anyone who knows anything about the dangers of amputation in 1800s.  

We have a disabled main character, but he also a constant sceptic in an haunted house so definitely mocked by the narrative. I don't think he disabled in the film adaption but I'm gonna have to re-watch that because I rated it very high and I'm curious to remind myself why. Possible because all the sex stuff is not there, but definitely had questionable things on disability too. 

The sexual nature of this book has aged it terribly. Frankly, now it would be comical for some of the tad bits.

Like Jesus's giant penis.

. Yes, Americans are still weird about sex but gay people exist in normality now and thanks to the internet, I treat kink in horror like an annoying jump scare. I think it would be funny to adapt it now, with modern people. Maybe that's just Scary Movie 2. 

The haunting is meant to be personal but I get the women confused and had to go back to figure out who was being sexually violated this time. 

The ending is too convoluted. Frankly, you can only do a fake out once, where this book does three times and expects me to respect it. 

The setting of Christmas is incredibly random and it's never justified, or brought up until the last line of the novel. Why start this thing five days before Christmas? I mean in real life, stuff happens whenever but story tend to have reasons for being set at Christmas. 

Anyway, Maine continues to be the most cursed place in Horror. Its funny seeing it appear pre-Stephen King who has a thing against his home state. I will probably read "I am legend" but probably done on the novel front for Matheson.

I read this cause I was really into the movie, Legend of Hell House, and in this case, the movie is better than the book.  The book was a very quick read, I finished it in one sitting, not because the story was super compelling, the writing was just kinda easy to read. It is misogynist, homophobic, perverted, and worse of all, boring.  

Writing a full review to air my grievances with what could've been a good story.

Some contextual spoilers, CWs below. Major spoilers are hidden.

I feel like any fair negative review of a book should have some caveats, so here are mine: I understand that readers must separate the writing from the author to a certain degree, and that characters, actions, etc. should not directly reflect upon the writer. I understand that this novel was written in a very different time than the one that I'm reading it in. And I acknowledge that sadism is particularly hard for me.

All that said, before Hell House, I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and it was one of the best novels I've ever read. All of my caveats can be applied to the latter, so why did I love McCarthy and loathe Matheson?

For one, McCarthy never dwelled upon brutality and violence, but instead described it to a degree in which the reader might be appalled but not nauseated (YMMV) and then moved on. Matheson, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy writing the sadistic and cruel, and spent paragraphs describing (CW)

sexual assault

,

rape

, and

possession

in graphic detail. Sure, the goal was to make the reader uncomfortable, but the degree and frequency in which (CW)

sexual assault

was a plot device makes one wonder if Matheson ever considered any other fate for his female characters.

Which leads me into my second complaint. Two of the four main characters are women, but around 80% of the brutality and humiliation is inflicted upon them. Sure, the men get beat up, tossed around, bruised, bloodied, etc. But the women receive far worse and almost always with sexual overtones. If a woman is possessed by a ghost in Matheson's care, the best she can hope for is exposing herself genitalia to the group and making lewd advances. The worst is saved for later when (major CW & spoilers)

the main female character gets assaulted and raped until she commits suicide.

No male character even so much as gets hit in the balls.

So what's Matheson's deal? It's clear that he thinks very little of women in general, as in the first act both women tremble, faint, start, and shriek at every noise and movement, and fail to comprehend the big smart brain topics that the men try to share with them. By the second act, they're without agency, cowardly, and easily manipulated by Hell House. But Matheson's contempt for women isn't just shown by the overt atrocities committed upon them, it's also the lack of equal distribution of the atrocities to the men of the group.

And this is without even mentioning Edith's wildly unpredictable sexuality, blamed on

Lionel's impotence and her father's sexual assaults upon her as a child

. Matheson fails to grasp his character's sexuality or explore it any meaningful way and thus it becomes an unfortunate footnote tacked upon the dynamics between the four main characters. Instead of Edith having depth and her unresolved issue of sexual identity becoming a weakness for Hell House to exploit, it becomes another outlet for Matheson's fetishism.

Assuming you can forgive everything I've laid out so far, Matheson still commits the cardinal sin of

making shallow excuses for characters to return to the house when escape (and survival) would be easy. Even after their benefactor dies and they are no longer guaranteed their payment, they still return multiple times to Hell House.

I don't care how believable your dialogue is, how believable the characters, I refuse to believe that these people would be this careless for their own lives.

Make the car break down, have a storm roll in and flood the roads, anything to trap them in that house.

To wrap this up, I'll try and summarize my feelings about this experience. I was interested enough in the plot to continue reading and try to see where it went. I did not feel like I was rewarded for my effort. The only memorable parts of this novel are memorable for all the wrong reasons. The prose was frustratingly repetitive (take a drink every time a character smiles). The protagonists were shallow, their fates far too heavy-handed. The specters and phenomena were far too tangible to stay scary for long, and Matheson compensated for this lack of spookiness by giving the ghosts erections and shortage of morals.

At times this was really good, but it's clearly written by a man in the 70s who wanted to put in as much sex stuff as possible and that aspect was just weird. If you ignore this though, it's an interesting concept with enough tension to keep you reading.