Wraithful Reads

Content Warning: This review talks about sexual violence and has descriptions of body horror.

I think the only thing haunting me about this book is my hatred for it. Alright, hatred might be too strong a word, but I finished the book feeling like it just fell flat. For a book that had an accolade from Stephen King, calling it “…the scariest haunted house novel ever written,” I went in with high expectations, and felt sadly let down. Which surprised me because I’ve read other work by Richard Matheson and enjoyed it – What Dreams May Come is a beautiful story, and was the basis for the visually stunning film of the same name. It stars Robin Williams and is a firm favourite of mine. But anyway; the review.

Hell House is a supposed reworking of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, taking on the classic haunted house genre. We begin the story with a meeting between  Dr. Lionel Barrett and a rich, dying businessman who tasks Barrett to prove conclusively whether ghosts exist or not, and offers a large sum of money to do so. Dr Barrett and his wife Edith therefore join a team of two mediums in order to investigate the so-called “Hell House” for a week.

We’re told the Belasco house is infamous; with two separate investigations happening previously, which resulted in the participants dying in gruesome ways or going insane. Seemingly, the only person who has survived the house relatively unscathed is Benjamin Fischer, a medium who entered the Belasco house first as a teenager, and who is now joining the team to investigate a second time, to face the house and reclaim the psychic abilities he’s left to wither due to the horror of what he experienced.

The second medium, Florence Tanner, is the leader of a spiritualist church as well as a former actress, and is described as having her own intentions in the house, namely wanting to cleanse the house and help the spirits trapped there move into the afterlife. Also described as a stunningly beautiful red-haired woman, she becomes the focus of a lot of the sexual violence that occurs in the book. (Which red-haired woman hurt you, Matheson?)

And the final members are Dr Barrett and his wife, Edith Barrett. Edith, who insists on coming along because she can’t stand the thought of waiting for her husband to come back, is described as mousy, timid, and frail in terms of her mental health. Her character is infantilised a lot, and it’s implied she’s much younger than her husband, while still an adult – already not great, but I was willing to see how the story unfolded.

The team get to the house, smothered in a supernatural smog, to discover the power is out, the windows are boarded up, and the phone is cut off. Regardless, they manage with candles and discuss the history of the house over dinner. The story progresses, tensions rise, and conflict emerges in the group – Dr Barrett is a physicist and wants to prove supernatural activity all has a basis in science, clashing with the mediums with his claims that ghosts don’t exist. Barrett clashes with Florence Tanner in particular, with his cold scientific approach clashing with Florence’s more “woo-woo” mystical approach to the house. The supernatural activity ramps up rapidly, with visions, possessions, and straight-up attacks, which result in the deaths of two of the group.

In a shockingly bad scene, Barrett has Edith examine Florence’s naked body ahead of a “sitting,” where Florence attempts to contact the spirits of the house. The in-book reason being it was part of the scientific investigation to prove Florence wasn’t somehow faking any results. Presumably, with the powers of her magic, ghost-summoning vagina. This triggers confusing feelings in Edith regarding her sexuality and is a large part of the horror experienced by Edith throughout the book. She’s sexually frustrated from Dr Barrett’s polio-induced impotence, and possibly not wholly heterosexual. With a heaping dose of homophobic commentary coming with it. Meh.

That scene is what first made me describe this book as “weirdly horny and not in a good way”, as it just reads as a sloppy teenage boy fantasy. And then it gets worse from there. Most of the sexual violence in this book is directed at Florence Tanner, ending up with her receiving bite marks around her nipples, a rape scene with a ghost, and her story culminates with her being penetrated by a huge depiction of the cross, complete with a giant penis. Then dying. I think if you can’t write horror without sexual violence directed at your female characters, then you’re just not a good horror writer. It was misogynistic and just dumb. Everything about Florence Tanner’s character just came across as a two-dimensional depiction of a superficial Hollywood starlet turned psychic copping for the worst events of the book, and I wasn’t into it.

Otherwise, the supernatural events that affect the male members of the group were pretty cookie-cutter, and I didn’t feel particularly scared by any of it. The book builds up the house to be this unholy terror, capable of tricking and killing anyone, even warping reality, which just makes the ending fall absolutely flat. The haunting is resolved by the main spirit of Belasco being cornered and called a “funny little dried up bastard” which makes him explode in rage and boom, haunting over.

Themes and Tropes:

• Haunted house
• Supernatural horror
• Body horror
• Violence
• Gore
• Is it real? – Dream-like sequences

Content Warnings:

• Body horror
• Graphic depictions of sex acts
• Graphic depictions of violence
• Sexual violence
• Cannibalism
• Death
• Alcoholism
• Insanity

To summarise: it was meh. A lot of build-up for a conclusion that just fell completely flat. Ben was probably the best character of the book, given that he spent most of it walking around drinking and yelling that everybody else was doing stupid things (he was right), before ultimately saving the day.

Rating: