This is a classic. Matheson has managed to create the perfect haunted house story, IMO. He has it all; eccentric rich men, mediums, the loyal wife, the dedicated scientist & the creepiest house in the most horrifying setting imaginable. There's some sex, plenty of violence & wonderfully described seances.

Best of all, there is a pervasive logic behind the entire story & several layers of horror. It's not just horror of outside forces, but also of inner demons. Each character is well fleshed out in various ways. Their mundane secrets & inner most feelings are used to wrench them through the story.

It's really masterfully done & I believe pieces of it have been used by quite a few of the horror flicks & books since then. I've never seen so many pieces put together so well, though. ( )

My review is here: http://moosplace.blogspot.com/2009/09... ( )

Hell House is one of the classics of haunted house horror, and it is indeed often a scary, chilling book. But it suffers from what a lot of horror does: A tendency to go over the top rather than stay subtle, an extra-thick layer of evil and depravity that I think does more to break the reader’s tenuous suspension of disbelief rather than height the tension and fear. Still, as horror tales go, this was a well-written and engrossing one, not quite as good as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but certainly better than a lot of the shlock being written today. ( )

This book serves as a nice companion piece to The Haunting of Hill House, although I like it less. There is a similar setup - scary old house that has more or less devoured people who lived in it is investigated by four researchers. In Hell House the investigators are a physicist/parapsychologist, his wife, a spiritual medium, & a physical medium who was the only survivor from the last investigation of the house.

Where the horror in The Haunting of Hill House is implicit, the horror in Hell House is decidedly explicit. It is for this reason that I like the book less. I've found that my imagination is wonderful at filling in blank spaces in terrifying ways & that's just what Shirley Jackson allows you to do. Hell House is definitely scary, but it demands less of you as a reader. It's more like a roller coaster ride where you are required to hang on & let the ride take you forward. Jackson takes your hand & walks along with you, sometimes guiding you, but most often whispering a suggestion in your ear or uttering a sharp intake of breath without explaining it. In the end, Jackson privileges your imagination where Matheson privileges his own.

Stephen King as written about both of these books as classics in the haunted house genre (& they are). You can see echoes of these books in some of his own books, particularly The Shining & The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, but also in the descriptions of the house in Salem's Lot (which may be his most terrifying book).

For an illuminating take on what makes things scary, I recommend this book as a pair with The Haunting of Hill House. Reading them both will teach you a lot about fear. ( )

Having seen "I Am Legend" in the theater I wanted to explore another of Matheson's works before I made a decision on whether he was someone I enjoyed or not. I picked this one up based on some reviews and was relatively happy with my choice. Hell House tells the story of a haunted house that destroys it's victims through murder, suicide, or insanity. Our story begins with another group of four trying to solve the mystery of Hell House.

This novel reads more as a mystery with some minor horror elements. Nothing in here made me keep the light on at night, but it did add a bit of the fantastic to they mystery. As a mystery, which I typically do not enjoy, it wasn't too bad. It had enough clues, enough twists and enough kept hidden from the reader to keep me moving forward. The mystery wraps up cleanly in the end without much left unresolved.

Hell House is a very quick read that will appeal to the mystery fan as well as the horror fan (just don't expect too much horror). ( )