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.

So this is what happens when The Haunting of Hill House is rewritten by a man who thinks he's edgy. I respect Matheson's contributions to the genre, but I can only assume this played better in 1971.

The women are barely people, hysterics at constant threat of (and victim of) sexual violence. Their bodies (particularly the more buxom of the two) are described in graphic detail. The men are reticent and upstanding and with the sole exception of the one character's post-polio disability being a factor, the men's bodies are essentially not described. The backstory is just a mashup of the most morally abhorrent things a straight man in 1970 could think of, which of course means that much of it isn't even particularly shocking (oh no! Sex parties and lesbians!).

And then at the end it turns out the Big Bad became so because he was... insecure? Because he was short and born illegitimate? I guess, while I'm sitting here in the US in 2025 watching two men burn the country to the ground because people made fun of them on the internet, it shouldn't make me scoff, but it does anyway.

I was not a fan of this book. I didn't care for the characters, the plot was weak, and the only interesting moment was when stuff started flying around the dining room. I truly didn't care who lived or died and the ending wasn't satisfying. 

I loved this book, it read like a movie and the twists and tension is so good! Definitely a recommendation!

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.