I have said it many times before and I swear that I’ve meant it every time, but this time I know with a certainty that Hell House is absolutely the worst book I have ever read in my entire life. Proclaimed as a horror story about a haunted house and a group of people that deal with the specters of the house, it is anything but what it pretends to be. Disgusting and nauseating in all the wrong ways, Hell House is nothing more than a perverted misogynist fantasy.

The individuals in this story are not real characters but instead caricatures to be tormented and, in the case of Edith and Florence, to be sexually abused repeatedly. Matheson paints Edith’s attraction to women as some kind of horror, her sexual desires marking her as some kind of deviant. I realize that this book was written in 1971, but give me a break. It is very obvious that Edith’s character was written by a misogynist man, as her entire purpose for entering Hell House is to aid her husband. She’s portrayed as a dumb, clingy, unstable woman who can’t function if she’s left alone or away from Lionel’s side for even a minute.

Florence’s purpose is to be molested and raped and otherwise sexually abused for the majority of Hell House. When she’s not being objectified, she’s arguing with Lionel about the aspects and reality of the spiritual realm. If Matheson’s descriptions are taken literally, the only physical aspect of Florence that the reader need concern themselves over are her breasts. Florence, the God-fearing medium, offers herself up to be raped by a ghoulish corpse in order to allow its escape from Hell House. I wish that I was joking.

The actual plot of Hell House is non-existent. Four people meander around the halls of the house for hundreds of pages, accomplishing nothing. Matheson’s writing is so unbearably repetitive and simplistically boring. Not only that, at times his prose literally doesn’t make sense. Here is an example:

“Barrett grunted as he jimmied the end of a plank from the side of a plank from the side of the crate stamped FRONT.”

What does that even mean? The book is full of stupid, nonsensical sentences like the one I’ve mentioned here.

Aside from the horrible sexual violence and abuse of women, the second most offensive aspect of Hell House is how absolutely dull and completely not scary the entire thing is… unless you consider giggling ghosts, steam-room slimes, flying flatware, and crazy cats to be terrifying. Matheson’s idea of horror comes in two forms: laughable cliché and grotesque sexual violence. Part of me honestly thinks that Matheson wrote Hell House as some kind of deranged erotic fiction for himself, as those awful moments are the only ones where he appears to put forth effort.

Hell House is a terribly written, unfathomably boring, disgustingly misogynist affront to literature. The only horrifying thing about Hell House is that there are people who actually consider this a good book.