Hell House
By: Richard Matheson / Narrated By: Ray Porter
Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
Uhm…. Okaaaaaaay….?
So sue me; a LOT of people loved this book, and I s’pose for the time it was written, early 70s, it was cutting edge. But I dunno, I thought it was a tad overwrought.
Yeah, there are a lot of sexual escapades, and I’ve mentioned rePEATedly (If you’ve happened to read some of my earlier reviews of, say, romance) that I’m most ashamedly a prude. But really, here the sex is just silly.
Here’s the story in a rather verbose nutshell. Hell House was once the site of a depraved man’s debauchery, drug abuse, and there was just an awful amount of sinning going on in there. TOTALLY haunted now, and there was a bit of an “expedition” in 1949 to explore it, but everyone in that expedition died during the jaunt, leaving a lone survivor who’s a trifle nutty now.
He’s a bit of a medium, and he joins another medium, plus a scientist who has created a machine that will rid the house of all its hauntings which he, Bartlett, the scientist, believes is all due to forms of electrical activity. Bartlett thinks the two mediums are charlatans and nut jobs, and he’ll do whatever he can to debunk them both.
Well, it turns out that the psychics, especially the woman, Florence, are. hypersensitive to the spirits, but all the total wackiness that surrounds her can be explained through rational arguments. So things get nuttier and nuttier, the spirit haunting the house torments her, all sorts of sexual mayhem ensues because everybody is so totally repressed (And it turns out that Bartlett can’t be… a husband… to his wife, Edith, who is okay with that because of sexual abuse in her past)…
And am I boring you yet? Cuz I was certainly bored. I mean, author Richard Matheson is revered amongst writers, esPECially writers of horror, esPECially Stephen King, but I dunno? Maybe for the time it was all very scintillating? But I listen to a lot of romance, and let me tell you, if I could survive KJ Charles and his audiobook, Band Sinister, with all of ITS moans and raging, it’ll have to take a LOT to make me blush. Okay, maybe Hell House’s sexual encounters made my toes curl, but I think that has more to do with narrator Ray Porter being familiar to me through the Christmas audiobook Tinsel. For heaven’s sake, I listened to the man repeat lyrics to Christmas carols, listened to him do a televangelical preacher’s Christmas sermons. How ODD then to hear possessed characters writhing around, trying to jump each other, shouting the F word (As both a noun and a verb)? Ray Porter, I do so wish I had heard you doing the F word BEFORE I listened to you, however cynically, talk about Santa and elves and such all.
Besides which, the cat in the story catches a bum rap, and it’s not like cats need any more bad press (Just ask RoRo—He thinks if he gets stuffed into one more Halloween costume, and a picture is taken, he’s gonna go all Hell House on me).
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