![]() ![]() I always find it hard to wrap my head around just how long ago Matheson’s stories were written the shock-value has held up well for over half a century, but perhaps not entirely for the reasons the author intended. I’ve been reading horror all my life, but there were moments when I had to put the book down and stare into empty space to get rid of the graphic body horror he conjured in my mind, so caveat lector-this book comes with just about every trigger warning I can think of. The evil atmosphere keeps on building and building, as does the violence. I’ve always found Matheson to be a no-nonsense type of writer who gets straight to the point, and believes in showing over telling. Just as in Jackson’s seminal novel, a party of four people (skeptics and mediums) stay in a haunted mansion for the purposes of scientific study, and all are plagued by unseen terrors… Hell House is nowhere near as subtle about it as Hill House though, and I am fully convinced that Matheson meant his story as a gory, debauched tribute to it. Thus Hell House begins, and the parallels to Shirley Jackson’s classic are hard to ignore, starting with the similar title, off by just one letter, and the almost meta reference to gothic novels in the first few sentences. ![]() He felt rather like a character in some latter-day Gothic romance.” “It had been raining hard since five o’clock that morning. ![]() The Haunting of Hill House meets 120 Days of Sodom and The Wizard of Oz in Matheson’s salacious, lurid take on a gothic ghost story with his signature pseudo-scientific spin. ![]()
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