Hell House

Richard Matheson was an underrated novelist. He wrote fast-paced works, visual and visceral, full of philosophical questions and characters facing the unknown.

My favorite is "I Am Legend," but "Hell House" turned out to be a very exciting and scary read. Four people enter a haunted house to prove to a millionaire that there's life after death, or that there isn't. Like all good haunted houses, Hell House is a character in itself. It has everything--creaking rocking chairs, deserted rooms, a Satanist chapel, awful smells.

There are other surprises, mostly of the psychosexual variety, as each of the characters faces fear, insecurity, and blinding personal shame. Matheson describes all of this very well, sometimes in terms that were more explicit than I had expected. This book is definitely rated R, or possibly NC-17--no cute lil ghosts in white sheets here.

But there are lots of good scares, and that's what I go to a haunted house book for. Unlike Matheson's other works, this one had slow spots and was a bit repetetive in places. The narrator did probably the best job out of any book I've listened to from Audible--seriously, with two male and two female voices, and various ghosts, I always knew who was speaking.

Recommended for mature ghost-story lovers.

If you like horror novels like I do, you're probably disappointed with the appalling lack of truly scary stories on the market these days. It seems all the horror novelists of the past have gone "soft" (Stephen King, Peter Straub, etc.)
"Hell House", while written a long time ago, is still a very frightening novel, and one of the best ghost stories I've read.
The graphic descriptions of the house and the events inside are truly scary. There are several other books that have been written along the same theme (several people trapped inside a haunted house), but this book seems to be more intelligent than the others.
A very smart listen, and the narrator performed well, making good distinctions between male and female voices, even the voices of the ghosts were well done.
This book was a nice surprise and a good listen, certainly more than I was expecting.

Checking the dates of publication to be sure I was right that Hell House is a sort of pastiche or homage or even plagarism of "The Haunting of Hill House," I saw this opening sentence in Wikipedia that says it all:

"Hell House is a novel by American novelist Richard Matheson, published in 1971. The novel has significant similarities to the earlier work The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson, though rendered with much more violence and sexual imagery."

He beefed it up, basically. You could even say coarsened it and simplified it --- but in fact both novels are quite good. I suppose you could call it a remake! Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" is of course much scarier, because it deals with madness and human fragility as well as whatever haunts Hill House, and Audible has an excellent reading of it. Matheson uses the same set-up, the same basic scene and the same four basic characters -- six, really, counting the two cook/caretakers.

Shirley Jackson achieves true horror. Chilling, ghastly, oh-no horror, with never an indelicate word or scene. Its opening and closing paragraphs are famous. Matheson's Hell House is more conventional and less truly terrifying, despite a lot of Sturm und Drang. It is the Matheson book that was made into a great movie, "The Legend of Hell House," one of the scariest movies ever made, I thought as a girl.

The reading of this novel by Ray Porter is excellent. There are a lot of scary emotional scenes and the reader does well with them, and with character differentiation. I think both books are well worth listening to, for themselves and for the really instructive differences.

Richard Matheson is one of my favorite authors. Listening was even better. The narrator was great, the story though a bit old was still creepy. Highly recommended if you love a good ghost story.

Now this book is weird! The reason why I bought it is because it is narrated by Ray Porter - an excellent narrator.

If the author meant for it to be a horror or a thriller, he failed. I listened to the story before bed, alone, in the dark, and it failed to scare me. Many parts of the story I found amusing. I don't want to spoil anything for potential readers, so I will make an example: you're in the middle of a cemetery near a haunted house and you stumble upon a quartet of singing stone busts performing the Lollipop song (if you've seen Haunted Mansion with Eddie Murphy, then you know what I'm talking about). I liked the reason behind the haunting of the house (i.e. the house's past). I didn't like the way the book ended, I felt like the author was in a hurry to finish and just sort of... did.

The narration was amazing though, which doesn't come as a surprise to me, because Ray Porter is a genius and deserves a medal.

Overall, I would recommend this book but not for people who want to listen to a horror story and experience fear and a rush of adrenaline.

Top 10

It was scary yet had some funny moments where I laughed out loud

Narrator was excellent

I've always loved Hell House. I've read it twice in book form, and I think I enjoyed it most listening to it on my third journey to the Belasco House. Believable and truly frightening, Hell House is a horror story to be savored. While the movie based on the book (The Legend of Hell House) is enjoyable, I hope that a more faithful version is made someday. This remains my favorite Halloween read!

Suspenseful , Eerie, Thrilling

The Legend of Hell House is a 1973 British horror film

The book was just as scary as the movie when I first saw it. The narrator Ray Porter was exceptional in making the characters believable and his discriptions were so vivid of the times and events in the book.
I would highly recommend this book as a listen if you love suspense or horror. The book is very graphic and I would not recommend it to the weak.

Richard Matheson is a master of subtlety! Hell House invites you into its' madness and doesn't release you to the very end. As the characters approach the house, the feeling of doom is almost palpable. Matheson's proficiency at weaving simile and metaphor to tingle your spine is genius. The author wrote a masterpiece of horror without having to revert to gore instead relying on imagery a craft Matheson's knows all to well.

This book was so enjoyable. It's not some run-of-the-mill crime dressed up by a spooky local legend (Tony Hillerman), but a real ghost. It's not for the faint of heart, however. There is a large amount of violence and an even larger amount of sex; creepy, deranged sex. It never seems exesive, though. Not too much ghost, not too much people, not too much talking, not too much scaring. It's a perfectly balanced ghost story that kept me up at night.