She’s brutally murdered in a sacrilegious act of sexual violence as punishment for her combination of faith, naivete, and too much hotness. I pity Florence Tanner she does literally all of the heavy lifting in this novel, and yet receives almost the entirety of the physical - and overwhelmingly sexual - abuse from the ghost(s) and nothing but disdain and estrangement from the other characters. Instead, I cringed at Matheson’s attempt to draw comparison between his story and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom - comparing de Sade to Matheson is like comparing a Spanish fresco to a “restored” Spanish fresco. This book would have benefited immensely from parallel timelines I’d have enjoyed watching the tendrils of Emeric’s sadism mature and unfold alongside our heroes’ exploration and discovery of the house’s terrors. Not so for Hell House we’re still in the opening chapters when - through long and unimaginative exposition - we learn the entire sadistic life story of Emeric Belasco, the inexplicably evil villain who owned the house. It’s vastly different from the set up to Shirley Jackson’s superior The Haunting of Hill House (1959) because in Hell House the doctor is married to the mousy traumatized woman, and in Hill House the doctor is NOT married to the mousy traumatized woman.Īny author worth their ghost-deterring salt ring will tell you that if you want to build suspense, you save some of the mystery surrounding your primary villain until the climax of the story. He brings along Edith, his mousy and doting wife who literally cannot function without him Florence Tanner, a medium, spiritualist, and glorified sex doll and Benjamin Franklin Fisher, a lapsed medium and the cynical lone survivor of the last attempt to study the same house. Barrett - an obsessive parapsychologist with a bum leg - accepts the proposal of a rich, dying Manhattanite to study the infamously-haunted Belasco House and prove once and for all whether or not ghosts are real.
The story begins with an intriguing enough setup: Dr. Hell House takes place in the winter of 1970 in Maine. I get what I deserve for my self-destructive curiosity. Neither did the gracious booksellers at McNally Jackson, who tried to spare me by hiding their only copy in the basement. Having read this recently, I’d like to do my part in undoing the misinformation that claims this book is “best” anything.īrace yourself for spoilers because my main goal is to prevent you from ever reading Hell House I don’t want anyone else to waste a few hours of their life (and $17.99) on this monstrosity. When you google “best horror” books online, Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House will pop up on various top ten/twenty/one hundred lists to this day. TW/CW: violence, gore, racism, homophobia, & sexual assault
Hell House - the world’s worst “best” horror novel
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