Hell House

As the name might suggest, this novel is very much a spiritual descendant of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, with a very similar setup: ghost hunters visit a haunted house that’s been abandoned for decades. That, however, is where the similarities end. In Matheson’s work, the haunting is more physical, with bodily threats to the ghost hunters at every turn, and the psychological and spiritual terror it inflicts does far more damage to them at each step, turning them against each other in violent and sometimes deadly ways.

Stephen King once called Hell House the scariest haunted house novel ever written. And it would be hard for me to disagree. The Belasco House, much like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, is a place of pure evil. Abandoned for decades after a series of terrible incidents, it’s now being opened again so that a group of scientists and mediums can spend the night in order to conduct experiments and prove that life after death really exists. Of course, it does, and in Hell House that means the kinds of things you never should wake up.