Weirdly horny with flat characters, a flimsy premise, and a predictable plot. Hell House reflects attitudes of its time, and not in the best ways. I stuck through to the end thinking it would at least get scary at some point, but no luck.  Based on the other reviews, I’m now looking forward to reading a real horror story in Haunting of Hill House. 

70s sexual objectification lol

Not very frightening and too much sexual content for my taste.

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.

I found the story interesting, but the writing not so much. The characters seem to be very stereotypical. And sexual violence is used as a shock factor.

this definitely could’ve benefited from less sexual content and the general vibe of misogyny was a bit iffy, plus the casual lesbophobia but when you’re reading this in 2024 as something that was written in the early 70s you definitely have to expect these sorts of themes and executions

the book itself for the most part was extremely tense and the hauntings were really well written, the ending threw me a bit and made the horror of the house feel a little silly when you knew the real story, but overall this was extremely fun to read and a really good one for spooky season

i didn’t have any real connection to the characters and i feel like the women in this were treated incredibly poorly by the author, however it did work in the context of the house and the owner’s depravity and over sexual nature so swings and roundabouts with this one i guess! 

remember to keep in mind that this is not a modern novel when reading, and that a lot of the content is included probably for shock factor as well as being a product of the time period 

Over all, the book was good, and it could have been a five-star read if there wasn't so much unnecessary sexual crap going on. Literally, the ghost was sexually assaulting/harassing people more than killing. 

My first read from richard matheson. 

Lets get the characters straight first cuz the names were so confusing! 

Deaustch- the rich guy who wants the investigation to be done at hell house for life after death, which he refers to as “survival”. Also the current owner of hell house.

Florence tanner- a medium/spiritualist. Florence was definitely one of my favourite out of the bunch.. 

Benjamin franklin fischer- a guy who survived the hell house in 1940, 30 years ago when he was 15, also a medium. And he seems to be the most aware of how the hell house works and how it manipulates the residents. I loved the scene where he got a wake up call and realised he was THE most powerful physical medium and was missing the opportunity to take hell house head on. Wow that complete monologue was intense. 

Dr. Lionel Barret- a physicist with an interest in parapsychology. And Edith, his wife. I personally didn’t like Edith and Dr. Barrett much cuz Dr. Barrett refused to believe in the supernatural despite the fact that the worst of it was right in his face. 

But that ending changed most of my presumptions.

And as the story progresses the happenings and incidents keep getting more and more frequent and dangerous. And I pretty much loved the final act- the gruesomeness and intensity of the incidents- except for how the said malevolent powerful entity was dealt with. 

One major turn off about the whole book was the amount of sex scenes in it. Pretty unnecessary and although I am new to horror books but having watched so many horror movies I sort of know that the older horror movies/books have so damn much sexual scenes.. sometimes it gets more disturbing than the actual horror story. As I had to skip through the said scenes, it took me out of the story. Which I didn’t like. This could have done without those scenes. 

Recently I am writing the word “anticlimactic” more and more in my reviews cuz all these horror books are so so good right until the end. It’s like the author almost convinced you that its a masterpiece but then completely missed the ending. 

It was good and enjoyable nonetheless so 3 out of 5 stars!