Book Review: Hell House
Aug. 8th, 2015 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
withinadream[Note: This review contains discussion of rape and other sexually skeevy things, and also spoils the hell out of Hell House. Also necrophilia and sexual violence and all sorts of gross stuff. Warning for extremely sexualized horror, basically.]
I went on a ghost-story binge this July. There were some really great books, and some duds, but only one actively upset me. That honor goes to Hell House, by Richard Matheson, heralded by Stephen King as "the scariest haunted house novel ever written." I certainly wasn’t expecting anything incredibly progressive from a horror novel originally published in the 1970s, but I wasn’t prepared for a character literally being raped to death by a crucifix.
The plot goes like this: Emeric Belasco’s house, the titular Hell House, is the most haunted house in America. It has a near-100% fatality rate. An elderly paranormal aficionado offers up a substantial reward and puts together a group of people to investigate the house and prove or disprove the haunting, made up of renowned Spiritualist Florence Tanner, Ben Fischer (who was the lone survivor of the ill-fated 1940-something expedition into the house when he was twelve), and Dr. Barret, a professor of the paranormal. Dr. Barret ends up bringing his wife Edith along. There was the potential for something interesting with a conflict between the group members—Barret is adamant that all paranormal activity is caused by nothing more than electrical activity, whereas Tanner strongly believes in the presence of lost souls in our world, and Fischer just wants to make it out alive and collect his money. But ultimately the novel was such a sexist, rapey mess that I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy any of it.
The book’s first sin was going overboard trying to make Belasco Sexual and Evil. Basically, he set up this house to have a home for his wild, illegal, and immoral orgies. The narrative takes great delight in detailing all of his activities—creating gay orgy porn! Necrophilia! Feeding virgins to lions! (If you’re thinking that one of those things is not like the others…it could be put down to the close-3rd POV, but I’m pretty sure the narrative was as horrified at the gay porn as it was at the fucking corpses.) At a certain point as an author, you have to take a step back and say, “am I really creating an effective villain here, or are my readers going to be laughing their asses off at the sheer determination of my antagonist to find a steady supply of virgins so he can jerk off to them being eaten by lions?” (In my opinion, Matheson crossed the line of believability. All of Belasco’s crimes are so heavily sexualized, and it just ended up reading like one of those torture-porn fics that trolls write about My Little Pony, you know? “And then the furnace went out and they all got pneumonia, but they were so busy doing drugs and fucking that they didn’t even notice! And then when they started to die, the living people would just keep fucking the corpses! And then there was cannibalism, because that’s edgy, right?”) (Please note that the part in quotations is an accurate summary of a history lesson we’re given in the novel. That is exactly what happened.)
A lot of horror novels I’ve read fall short with characterization, leaving me rooting for the monster instead of the bland protagonists. Hell House certainly had some interesting characters, but ultimately they were so dependent on sexist tropes that I couldn’t enjoy them.
Florence Tanner is a former actress and devout Spiritualist. She goes into the house expecting it to be full of tortured souls she can help free. So, the “twist” at the end of the book is that there’s only one ghost in the house—Emeric Belasco. He’s so powerful that he can create legions of fake apparitions and personalities to trick the investigators who enter his domain, which is exactly what he did to Tanner by creating a fake son who was pressured into joining his father’s depraved orgies and then walled up in the basement. In theory, the idea of an evil spirit creating false identities to lure ghost-hunters and mediums in is really cool, but in Hell House, it’s only ever beautiful young women who Belasco tricks this way, leaving you with the impression that the author thinks that only women can have empathy for trapped souls or something? And of course Belasco uses the son persona to seduce Tanner, leading to lots of skeevy sex scenes culminating in a hallucination of having sex with a rotting corpse. (I’ll talk more about the sexualized nature of the attacks after I’ve gotten through more of the characters, because wow were there some uncomfortably gendered tropes here.)
Tanner’s death really deserves its own paragraph, because it’s what pushed me over the edge from, “This book is interesting, but unfortunately sexist” to “Holy shit, burn it with fire!” She ventures into this pornographic parody of a chapel that Belasco built, at its center an ~incredibly edgy~ statue of the crucifixion of Jesus with an erect penis. Belasco causes the crucifix to fall during her investigation, resulting in Florence being raped to death by a statue of Jesus Christ. When the other investigators find her, we are treated to a graphic description of her injuries. Nothing more fun than extremely sexualized violence to remind you that as a woman, you’re not the intended audience of this book!
The other woman in the main cast is Edith, Dr. Barret’s wife. (When I started reading, I was actually excited that the cast had a 50/50 gender split!) She talks her husband into taking her with him to Hell House, which we soon find out is because she’s terrified to be separated from him. During their marriage, he’s left for one week-long business trip without her, during which she had an extreme nervous breakdown. This dependence is handled with typical (un)subtlety, and as a bonus, we’re treated to an exploration of her sexuality (she’s reluctant to have sex with her husband as a result of childhood trauma, and that plotline was handled just as badly as you’d expect).
100% of the ghostly attacks against Edith centered around sex. She’s possessed by Belasco and forced to come on to the other three group members. Edith is especially horrified by her interactions with Florence, and spends an entire chapter being disgusted by her “innate lesbian tendencies”. And…that’s it. That’s Edith’s entire plotline: separation anxiety and sexual assault, neither of which does the narrative treat with any sort of compassion or subtlety.
The two male characters, of course, get interesting plotlines focused on non-sexual aspects of their personalities. Dr. Barret tests out a machine he’s spent his entire live developing to clear an area of electromagnetic influence and thus eliminate violent hauntings; Belasco waits until the machine has been run to kill Barret, meaning his last thoughts before dying are that his life’s work has been a failure. Fischer spends his time in the house convinced that he’s outsmarted the ghosts, only to realize that Belasco has only been playing with him. The men get plots about hubris and professional failings, whereas the women get violent sexual assault.
I wish I had a copy of the book available, because I’m not sure I’m able to fully convey how grossly sexualized Florence and Edith’s hauntings were without direct quotes. There’s a full scene devoted to a vivid description of Florence hallucinating having anal sex with Belasco. The scene where she has sex with a rotting corpse? Also described in incredible detail. Edith’s encounters with Fischer and Dr. Barret are, you guessed it, thoroughly expressed. Tanner’s corpse gets half a page of description (focusing on her disfigured genitals), while Dr. Barret’s body gets a mere sentence before the narrative moves on. Apparently hearing about the nonsexual way a man’s body gets mutilated is way more disturbing than the sexualized death of a woman.
In case you’re wondering how the story ends, I’ll fill you in so you don’t have to read the novel. Dr. Barret runs his miraculous machine, the house goes quiet, and we assume for a while that the spirits are gone. Tanner, however, is convinced that Belasco (along with the trapped soul of his son) remains. She ventures into the chapel, where the crucifix scene happens, and has an epiphany about the nature of the haunting, trying to leave a message written in her blood for the others to find. Edith and Fischer remove her body from the house, leaving Dr. Barret to run his machine again. This is where he dies. Edith and Fischer find his corpse, and flee from the house, after Fischer realizes the truth about the haunting—Belasco is the only ghost in the house. It would take a spirit of incredible power to orchestrate such a haunting by himself, so no one had considered the possibility. As it turns out, Dr. Barret’s machine did work a bit, trapping Belasco in the chapel (where his body is buried). Even better, the man who hired them has died while they were in the house, meaning neither Edith nor Fischer will get a cent of the promised reward (his son and heir is a staunch skeptic).
There you have it—the worst book I’ve ever read. (If anyone’s interested in my AU fanfic plot where Florence is a man and Dr. Barret and Fischer are women, hit me up and I can post that too.)
I went on a ghost-story binge this July. There were some really great books, and some duds, but only one actively upset me. That honor goes to Hell House, by Richard Matheson, heralded by Stephen King as "the scariest haunted house novel ever written." I certainly wasn’t expecting anything incredibly progressive from a horror novel originally published in the 1970s, but I wasn’t prepared for a character literally being raped to death by a crucifix.
The plot goes like this: Emeric Belasco’s house, the titular Hell House, is the most haunted house in America. It has a near-100% fatality rate. An elderly paranormal aficionado offers up a substantial reward and puts together a group of people to investigate the house and prove or disprove the haunting, made up of renowned Spiritualist Florence Tanner, Ben Fischer (who was the lone survivor of the ill-fated 1940-something expedition into the house when he was twelve), and Dr. Barret, a professor of the paranormal. Dr. Barret ends up bringing his wife Edith along. There was the potential for something interesting with a conflict between the group members—Barret is adamant that all paranormal activity is caused by nothing more than electrical activity, whereas Tanner strongly believes in the presence of lost souls in our world, and Fischer just wants to make it out alive and collect his money. But ultimately the novel was such a sexist, rapey mess that I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy any of it.
The book’s first sin was going overboard trying to make Belasco Sexual and Evil. Basically, he set up this house to have a home for his wild, illegal, and immoral orgies. The narrative takes great delight in detailing all of his activities—creating gay orgy porn! Necrophilia! Feeding virgins to lions! (If you’re thinking that one of those things is not like the others…it could be put down to the close-3rd POV, but I’m pretty sure the narrative was as horrified at the gay porn as it was at the fucking corpses.) At a certain point as an author, you have to take a step back and say, “am I really creating an effective villain here, or are my readers going to be laughing their asses off at the sheer determination of my antagonist to find a steady supply of virgins so he can jerk off to them being eaten by lions?” (In my opinion, Matheson crossed the line of believability. All of Belasco’s crimes are so heavily sexualized, and it just ended up reading like one of those torture-porn fics that trolls write about My Little Pony, you know? “And then the furnace went out and they all got pneumonia, but they were so busy doing drugs and fucking that they didn’t even notice! And then when they started to die, the living people would just keep fucking the corpses! And then there was cannibalism, because that’s edgy, right?”) (Please note that the part in quotations is an accurate summary of a history lesson we’re given in the novel. That is exactly what happened.)
A lot of horror novels I’ve read fall short with characterization, leaving me rooting for the monster instead of the bland protagonists. Hell House certainly had some interesting characters, but ultimately they were so dependent on sexist tropes that I couldn’t enjoy them.
Florence Tanner is a former actress and devout Spiritualist. She goes into the house expecting it to be full of tortured souls she can help free. So, the “twist” at the end of the book is that there’s only one ghost in the house—Emeric Belasco. He’s so powerful that he can create legions of fake apparitions and personalities to trick the investigators who enter his domain, which is exactly what he did to Tanner by creating a fake son who was pressured into joining his father’s depraved orgies and then walled up in the basement. In theory, the idea of an evil spirit creating false identities to lure ghost-hunters and mediums in is really cool, but in Hell House, it’s only ever beautiful young women who Belasco tricks this way, leaving you with the impression that the author thinks that only women can have empathy for trapped souls or something? And of course Belasco uses the son persona to seduce Tanner, leading to lots of skeevy sex scenes culminating in a hallucination of having sex with a rotting corpse. (I’ll talk more about the sexualized nature of the attacks after I’ve gotten through more of the characters, because wow were there some uncomfortably gendered tropes here.)
Tanner’s death really deserves its own paragraph, because it’s what pushed me over the edge from, “This book is interesting, but unfortunately sexist” to “Holy shit, burn it with fire!” She ventures into this pornographic parody of a chapel that Belasco built, at its center an ~incredibly edgy~ statue of the crucifixion of Jesus with an erect penis. Belasco causes the crucifix to fall during her investigation, resulting in Florence being raped to death by a statue of Jesus Christ. When the other investigators find her, we are treated to a graphic description of her injuries. Nothing more fun than extremely sexualized violence to remind you that as a woman, you’re not the intended audience of this book!
The other woman in the main cast is Edith, Dr. Barret’s wife. (When I started reading, I was actually excited that the cast had a 50/50 gender split!) She talks her husband into taking her with him to Hell House, which we soon find out is because she’s terrified to be separated from him. During their marriage, he’s left for one week-long business trip without her, during which she had an extreme nervous breakdown. This dependence is handled with typical (un)subtlety, and as a bonus, we’re treated to an exploration of her sexuality (she’s reluctant to have sex with her husband as a result of childhood trauma, and that plotline was handled just as badly as you’d expect).
100% of the ghostly attacks against Edith centered around sex. She’s possessed by Belasco and forced to come on to the other three group members. Edith is especially horrified by her interactions with Florence, and spends an entire chapter being disgusted by her “innate lesbian tendencies”. And…that’s it. That’s Edith’s entire plotline: separation anxiety and sexual assault, neither of which does the narrative treat with any sort of compassion or subtlety.
The two male characters, of course, get interesting plotlines focused on non-sexual aspects of their personalities. Dr. Barret tests out a machine he’s spent his entire live developing to clear an area of electromagnetic influence and thus eliminate violent hauntings; Belasco waits until the machine has been run to kill Barret, meaning his last thoughts before dying are that his life’s work has been a failure. Fischer spends his time in the house convinced that he’s outsmarted the ghosts, only to realize that Belasco has only been playing with him. The men get plots about hubris and professional failings, whereas the women get violent sexual assault.
I wish I had a copy of the book available, because I’m not sure I’m able to fully convey how grossly sexualized Florence and Edith’s hauntings were without direct quotes. There’s a full scene devoted to a vivid description of Florence hallucinating having anal sex with Belasco. The scene where she has sex with a rotting corpse? Also described in incredible detail. Edith’s encounters with Fischer and Dr. Barret are, you guessed it, thoroughly expressed. Tanner’s corpse gets half a page of description (focusing on her disfigured genitals), while Dr. Barret’s body gets a mere sentence before the narrative moves on. Apparently hearing about the nonsexual way a man’s body gets mutilated is way more disturbing than the sexualized death of a woman.
In case you’re wondering how the story ends, I’ll fill you in so you don’t have to read the novel. Dr. Barret runs his miraculous machine, the house goes quiet, and we assume for a while that the spirits are gone. Tanner, however, is convinced that Belasco (along with the trapped soul of his son) remains. She ventures into the chapel, where the crucifix scene happens, and has an epiphany about the nature of the haunting, trying to leave a message written in her blood for the others to find. Edith and Fischer remove her body from the house, leaving Dr. Barret to run his machine again. This is where he dies. Edith and Fischer find his corpse, and flee from the house, after Fischer realizes the truth about the haunting—Belasco is the only ghost in the house. It would take a spirit of incredible power to orchestrate such a haunting by himself, so no one had considered the possibility. As it turns out, Dr. Barret’s machine did work a bit, trapping Belasco in the chapel (where his body is buried). Even better, the man who hired them has died while they were in the house, meaning neither Edith nor Fischer will get a cent of the promised reward (his son and heir is a staunch skeptic).
There you have it—the worst book I’ve ever read. (If anyone’s interested in my AU fanfic plot where Florence is a man and Dr. Barret and Fischer are women, hit me up and I can post that too.)
