Richard Matheson is one of those authors that I enjoy but always forget about. Horror isn't my genre usually, so I don't seek out his books... but when I do (like I did for this challenge), I'm reminded of what a talented writer he was, and how truly expansive his bibliography is. For some reason, I think I was confusing Hell House with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which I read a few years ago and also enjoyed. Although I do have to admit, I think I liked Matheson's take a little bit more.

The backstory here is that Emeric Belasco owned a house that came to be known as Hell House, because he encouraged all kinds of sin and debauchery within the walls. People would stay for days, weeks, sometimes even months at a time, encouraged to indulge in their every dark and depraved fantasy. Eventually, people who came didn't leave at all and - after everyone in the house died and Emeric Belasco went missing - the house became haunted with the evil energy of all the people who died in the house. Over the decades, various people have sent groups to try and cleanse the house and every time it ended in tragedy.

This time is, of course, no different... the house begins to work its dark influence on the people staying there. What I really liked about the book was that each character experiences a dramatically different set of phenomena designed to prey on their fears, insecurities, and hidden desires... including to the point where the "rational" scientist believes himself to have successfully removed the evil spirits, only to be proven very, very wrong.

SPOILER ALERT... the only part about the book that I thought didn't work super well was the ending, although this book was originally published in 1971 so I think a lot of that might be owed to the fact that it was written in another era, when stories of haunted houses and malignant spirits and supernatural phenomena weren't as common. It was probably quite revolutionary at the time, but at the very end of the book, the revelation that all of the stuff in the house was solely the work of Emeric Belasco's spirit was a bit of a, "Yeah, no kidding" moment. The book spent a fair amount of time going into the history of how Belasco was a uniquely strong-willed, powerful, insightful, intelligent, and vicious person in life, so the red herrings with other "spirits" felt like red herrings.

Also, at the end, it turns out that Belasco wasn't missing... he holed himself up in a secret study in the house and died (hence the haunting... and yeah, not really a surprise there). Where it got a little corny was that Belasco was always called the Roaring Giant because he was over six feet tall and very imposing... and as it turns out, the real Belasco had shriveled little legs which he had amputated and wore prosthetics to give himself extra height. During the climax of the story, one of the mediums basically taunts Belasco, making fun of his tiny legs and all of his failures, which breaks the curse on the house. So the haunting was basically solved by... ridiculing an evil spirit until it shriveled up and dissipated.

Overall, it was a really good haunted house story (mostly for the way the characters were slowly seduced by the house's evil), that could've had a better ending but was probably a pretty good one for being written in 1971. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes haunted house tales, or horror stories in general.

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Created Mar 06, 2024 at 5:41pm • Submit your own review...