Randy continues our countdown to Hallowe’en 2013 with a review of an underrated novel.
HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson (Viking, 1971; Tor, 1999)
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” [Dr. Barrett] admitted. “It’s the Mount Everest of haunted houses, you might say. There were two attempts to investigate it, one in 1931, the other in 1940. Both were disasters. Eight people involved in those attempts were killed, committed suicide, or went insane. Only one survived, and I have no idea how sound he is – Benjamin Fischer, one of the two who will be with me.”
— from the first chapter
Hill House? The Overlook Hotel?
Pfhhht! Mere goose bumps compared to the Emeric Belasco mansion, otherwise known in parapsychological circles as Hell House, where your fears and insecurities are diagnosed, your differences with your companions assessed, and all are wielded as weapons to destroy you.
An ailing head of a publishing empire hires Dr. Barrett to prove survival after death by looking for facts in the one place on Earth in which haunting has never been disproven, Hell House. Along with Barrett, the publisher insists upon Fischer, a gifted physical medium (that is, capable of such physical acts as creating ectoplasm) before his first contact with Hell House but afterward tracing a downward spiral in his career and his life, and Florence Tanner, a mental medium (able to commune with the dead), also a pastor in a Spiritualist church. Neither would have been Barrett’s choice of companion, but the take-it-or-leave-it offer of $100,000, and the chance both to prove his theory that “haunting” is merely residual energy that can be depleted and eliminated and to finally build the machine to do so, is too attractive to refuse. The fourth, Edith, Dr. Barrett’s wife and his frequent partner in his researches, is the least invested member, but also the most vulnerable.
At TOR.com, Michael Bradley confirms something I remember reading a number of years ago (wish I could recall where) that Hell House was written in part because Matheson was dissatisfied with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which I willingly believed because the premise is so similar: Four people, one an academic with an interest in the supernormal (as Barrett would have it) another a damaged but gifted medium, all with the intent of proving a house is truly haunted, each with an emotional or intellectual frailty and some private guilt, and each with an assumption on the nature of the haunting, enter in spite of the reputation of the house for destroying its tenants. Over the course of a few days they are picked apart by … well, that’s where the novels diverge. Jackson doesn’t commit to ghosts, leaving the reader to interpret what is ghostly, what is psychological. But Matheson commits to a true haunting, and with a vengeance. Hell Houseis wickedly perverse, sexually explicit and mesmerizing in the logical step-by-step dismantlement of the defenses and strength, physical and moral, of the four investigators, building dread less through creation of atmosphere and mood than through solidly mortaring together event after event in escalating, focused, ruthless attacks, both physical and psychological.
What follows could be A SPOILER because a couple of plot elements, though probably not crucial, are mentioned while responding to criticism (not entirely unearned criticism) of Hell House:
SPOILER:
There are comments on-line regarding how obviously this is a product of the 1970s, and that’s true, but it’s equally true of any story that it bears the mark of its times, for good or bad. One point of criticism I’ve seen is that Florence calls on a spirit guide whom she names Red Cloud. Red Cloud is an Indian and by that I do not mean a Native American, but rather the stereotypical, “How! Me, Red Cloud” Indian from the bad old days of B-movie Westerns. Matheson wrote Westerns and I expect knew the stereotypes well and the novel’s anonymous narrator comments on how unrealistic the spirit guide is, offering the perspective that this is Florence’s way of coping with and interpreting the energies she is channeling. I believe Matheson was not being racist, but making an oblique comment on Florence and her perspective.
Another criticism brought up on-line is, I think, more complex and probably more justifiable, and I alluded to it in my comments on ]A Stir of Echoes. While Hell House attacks one of the men through his intellectual hubris and the other through his caution, with the women, though more explicitly, Matheson focuses on their sexuality. The history of the Barrett marriage indicates that he suffered an accident that left him incapable of sex, something his younger wife Edith has not been openly bothered by since an incident in her past undermined her enjoyment of sex. Still, once in Hell House the suppression of her sex drive makes sex an obsession. Meanwhile, Florence was a former film actress famous for avoiding the social life of Hollywood. In both cases, the house looks to undermine them in part by insinuating lesbian tendencies into their thoughts, or perhaps emphasizing tendencies already there, and each woman, especially Edith, is disturbed and unsettled by it.
Edith’s repugnance at lesbianism is not inconsistent with the general reaction of the time nor, considering recent developments in the U.S., all that unusual even now. So while I understand why this attitude may seem dated to some readers, unfortunately the novel may be less dated by these attitudes than by its technology, the gas-guzzling Caddy, the lack of cell phones and the Internet, etc. I do think that Matheson does a better job in this novel than in A Stir of Echoes in portraying the women. Florence’s reaction to the house’s assault on her sexuality is somewhat more nuanced than Edith’s: She tries to understand the forces at work and in particular one spirit she has identified and dedicated herself to save. And both women act and are not just acted on, both hold thoughts and base their actions on them, and Matheson does a nice job of balancing the views of Florence against the views of Professor Barrett; neither fully understand the true nature of Hill House’s haunting.
END OF SPOILER
Until the Will Smith movie version of I am Legend, and maybe even after, I would have nominated Matheson as the best-known unknown American writer of sf/fantasy/horror. For anyone 40 years of age or older, even though we may not have known his name, his imagination was on constant display throughout our cultural lives: I am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Twilight Zone (notably, “The Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”), various Roger Corman produced movies based (loosely) on Poe stories, The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror, “Duel”, Somewhere in Time, and many other novels, short stories and films bear his mark. Except for Stephen King, he may well be the most influential writer of horror, and particularly of an s.f./horror hybrid of the second half of the 20th century.
While reductive to characterize Richard Matheson as Stephen King 1.0, he appears to be the one older writer King has the most affinity to in terms of imagination and approach, and King has acknowledged this. But Matheson presents what I consider a harder surface, his writing more directly influenced by the journalistic and hard-boiled writers of his time period, the 1940s into the 1950s. Sentence by sentence, there isn’t as much to pare away (although I would definitely tweak some of his adverbs), but while you can understand and empathize with his characters, there’s less charm in the telling than in King’s better books; where Matheson writes a story to read, King chats over the kitchen table, confiding in you a homey tale about family and community, just before he removes the floor from under your chair.
Published in the same year as The Exorcist, Hell House still was – according to Bradley – one of Matheson’s best known works and one of his strongest sellers. I suspect both novels provided something of a template for the later “splatterpunk” movement, introducing the horror story to more detailed descriptions of violence and sexuality, and while I remain unconvinced that more explicit is more frightening, Hell House – and The Exorcist, for that matter – demonstrate it can be done effectively.
OTHER BAD HOUSES:
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Shining by Stephen King
The House of Windows by John Langan
Naomi’s Room by Jonathan Aycliffe
NEXT: SOFT SPOKEN BY Lucius Shepard
