Hell House by Richard Matheson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Hell House
Book Review: Not the best haunted house story ever written...but almost!
Summary: 5 Stars
Far more brutal and intense than the disappointing film version, this novel moves along at a great pace, thanks mainly to Matheson's crisp, no-nonsense prose and the fact that the entire action of the story takes place over the course of just a few days as the ghost of cruel and sadistic libertine, Emeric Belasco, concentrates all its efforts on the destruction of a team of squabbling scientists and psychics employed by a dying millionaire to prove that life exists after death. There is so much in this book that didn't make it into the film, and contrary to a previous reviewer's complaint, the Belasco House as it is presented here seems to me to be a magnificent and monstrous monument to Emeric Belasco's decadence and immorality. It's much more effective than the fairly pedestrian, cobwebbed manse that appears in the film version. There are some genuinely shocking sequences in this book (as Matheson once pointed out following criticism of the book's violence and sexual preoccupations, what's the point in writing a story about the most evil house in the world if all you're going to do is have leprechauns running around) and its influence is readily apparent in a lot of the haunted house novels that came after it (King's 'The Shining', for instance, which contains scenes that read as if they were lifted straight from Matheson's novel, and Chet Williamson's entertaining, if inferior, 'Soulstorm'). The greatest haunted house story ever written is undoubtedly Shirley Jackson's subtler, trickier 'Haunting of Hill House' - but for sheer unadulterated funhouse thrills and chills, 'Hell House' can't be bettered.