'Hell House' by Richard Matheson
Aug. 9th, 2009 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesDon't you sometimes wish horror novels and stories had more original and imaginative titles? It took me an embarrassing amount of time to get my head round the difference between Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which was made into a film called The Haunting, and Richard Matheson's Hell House, made into The Legend of Hell House...Though having recently finished the Matheson book, I can now say there's little chance of anyone genuinely confusing Hell House with Jackson's novel! I enjoyed the movie versions of both films, which were each chilling in their own way, but I'm afraid I found Hell House somewhat lacking. It's certainly not the Best Haunted House Story In The World Ever, or whatever it is Stephen King says on the cover of my copy (I've forgotten the exact wording, but he's a huge fan of the book.) It's also very different in flavour from his most famous works like I Am Legend or Duel (which I enjoyed very much.)
The plot of Hell House has become something of a cliche by now: at the behest of a morbid millionaire who wishes to find out whether or not there is an afterlife, a team of four people - a paranormal researcher, a physical medium, a mental medium and the researcher's wife - take up residence for a few days in an old mansion formerly belonging to one Emeric Belasco, a man whose wealth and power was only matched by his capacity for evil. Though not everyone present believes in ghosts per se, there is no doubt that the entities at large in Hell House are deeply inimical to human life. The mental medium, Fischer, was part of an earlier expedition into the house which resulted in the death of everyone else involved and gave him a massive nervous breakdown!
The gang arrive at the House in the grip of Winter, undeterred by their deeply unpleasant surroundings. As an especially nasty touch, all the windows have been bricked up, meaning they spend their first day and night in near-darkness while waiting for the electricity to come on. After Fischer gives a brief summary of the House's ghastly history as a sort of Disneyland for the damned and debauched they press on with their medium work, which though scary is inconclusive. Barrett is very skeptical of all this, and is staking all his hopes on the arrival of his 'EMR machine', a contraption he has built to blast unclean psychic energy right out of the house. But the house starts working on the guests faster than they can get to work on it, and soon all manner of mayhem arises as each character sees their deepest-buried, most secret traumas resurfacing as 'ghosts' in the dreadful place. Can anyone crack the mystery of Hell House, and will anyone even survive?
The bare bones of the plot are quite similar to Shirley Jackson's novel, but the tone couldn't be more different. Matheson casts restraint to the four winds and ladles on the sex and violence like it was going out of fashion. The sheer variety of horrors on display does initially unsettle the reader a little, but this kind of gross-out horror soon wears pretty thin, before becoming out-and-out ridiculous. Moreover, the 'sex' in question most often takes the form of sexual assault, with the glamorous physical medium Florence (conveniently, a former Hollywood belle) copping vast quantities of abuse, all of which is described in lingering detail. All the characters take a sound battering, but Matheson really seems to have it in for his female characters, for whom no humiliation or violation is too extreme. Preoccupations of misogyny aside, the endless descriptions of physical torment start to deaden the palate before the novel is half through. Meanwhile, Matheson lets most of the finer points of novel-writing slide. The characters are two-dimensional at best, and generally hard to like, and the novel has a dirge-like monotony about it that may please some, but made me wish for a bit of light relief. Admittedly, Matheson nearly succeeds in his job of maintaining a constant level of tension and 'body horror', but I prefer writing with a few nuances myself.
Despite all this, Hell House isn't quite in the same boat as most crummy modern horror novels a la Herbert or Koontz. In the beginning at least, the sheer blackness of the mood stamps itself firmly on the reader's consciousness, and it does have moments of real creepiness, even if this initial atmosphere ends up giving way to mere nausea and claustrophobia as the novel progresses. But even before the more unsavoury scenes take place, I found it a very hard novel to really enjoy - this may sound old-fashioned, but the word 'unwholesome' springs to mind when trying to describe the feel of the book. I couldn't quite pinpoint the reasons for this at first, but as the novel wore on I realized that it probably comes from the dissonance between the subject matter and the 'flavour' of the horror. In other words, the terrors are meant to be supernatural, but they're treated in a way that makes them seem real, even down-to-earth and banal, with none of the ambiguities, mystique or sense of wonder that is present in most of my favourite ghost stories. You respond to Matheson's crude efficacity as you would to the sight of a car crash or footage of war casualties, and I think that's what gives Hell House its rather sickly hue.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this to first-time Matheson readers, and its relentlessly depressing air makes it pretty much impossible to read 'ironically', as one would a pulp horror novel, but since it's a pretty famous piece of horror history it might be worth a read for genre afficionados.
The plot of Hell House has become something of a cliche by now: at the behest of a morbid millionaire who wishes to find out whether or not there is an afterlife, a team of four people - a paranormal researcher, a physical medium, a mental medium and the researcher's wife - take up residence for a few days in an old mansion formerly belonging to one Emeric Belasco, a man whose wealth and power was only matched by his capacity for evil. Though not everyone present believes in ghosts per se, there is no doubt that the entities at large in Hell House are deeply inimical to human life. The mental medium, Fischer, was part of an earlier expedition into the house which resulted in the death of everyone else involved and gave him a massive nervous breakdown!
The gang arrive at the House in the grip of Winter, undeterred by their deeply unpleasant surroundings. As an especially nasty touch, all the windows have been bricked up, meaning they spend their first day and night in near-darkness while waiting for the electricity to come on. After Fischer gives a brief summary of the House's ghastly history as a sort of Disneyland for the damned and debauched they press on with their medium work, which though scary is inconclusive. Barrett is very skeptical of all this, and is staking all his hopes on the arrival of his 'EMR machine', a contraption he has built to blast unclean psychic energy right out of the house. But the house starts working on the guests faster than they can get to work on it, and soon all manner of mayhem arises as each character sees their deepest-buried, most secret traumas resurfacing as 'ghosts' in the dreadful place. Can anyone crack the mystery of Hell House, and will anyone even survive?
The bare bones of the plot are quite similar to Shirley Jackson's novel, but the tone couldn't be more different. Matheson casts restraint to the four winds and ladles on the sex and violence like it was going out of fashion. The sheer variety of horrors on display does initially unsettle the reader a little, but this kind of gross-out horror soon wears pretty thin, before becoming out-and-out ridiculous. Moreover, the 'sex' in question most often takes the form of sexual assault, with the glamorous physical medium Florence (conveniently, a former Hollywood belle) copping vast quantities of abuse, all of which is described in lingering detail. All the characters take a sound battering, but Matheson really seems to have it in for his female characters, for whom no humiliation or violation is too extreme. Preoccupations of misogyny aside, the endless descriptions of physical torment start to deaden the palate before the novel is half through. Meanwhile, Matheson lets most of the finer points of novel-writing slide. The characters are two-dimensional at best, and generally hard to like, and the novel has a dirge-like monotony about it that may please some, but made me wish for a bit of light relief. Admittedly, Matheson nearly succeeds in his job of maintaining a constant level of tension and 'body horror', but I prefer writing with a few nuances myself.
Despite all this, Hell House isn't quite in the same boat as most crummy modern horror novels a la Herbert or Koontz. In the beginning at least, the sheer blackness of the mood stamps itself firmly on the reader's consciousness, and it does have moments of real creepiness, even if this initial atmosphere ends up giving way to mere nausea and claustrophobia as the novel progresses. But even before the more unsavoury scenes take place, I found it a very hard novel to really enjoy - this may sound old-fashioned, but the word 'unwholesome' springs to mind when trying to describe the feel of the book. I couldn't quite pinpoint the reasons for this at first, but as the novel wore on I realized that it probably comes from the dissonance between the subject matter and the 'flavour' of the horror. In other words, the terrors are meant to be supernatural, but they're treated in a way that makes them seem real, even down-to-earth and banal, with none of the ambiguities, mystique or sense of wonder that is present in most of my favourite ghost stories. You respond to Matheson's crude efficacity as you would to the sight of a car crash or footage of war casualties, and I think that's what gives Hell House its rather sickly hue.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this to first-time Matheson readers, and its relentlessly depressing air makes it pretty much impossible to read 'ironically', as one would a pulp horror novel, but since it's a pretty famous piece of horror history it might be worth a read for genre afficionados.
