Hell House

Though I enjoyed reading Hell House, I found the story to be predictable, the characters uninteresting, and the antagonist familiar. Perhaps this is because, since the publishing of Hell House in 1971, other stories and movies have hit the genre that are similar in plot and characters. Ghost hunters and scientists trying to discover the truth of life-after-death are commonplace in the genre of ghost stories. Look at the slew of found footage movies. Many of them use these same investigators as the focus of their narratives. Even The Haunting of Hill House used the investigation of a haunted house as the basis for its plot, and it has been done many times since both of these publications.

Perhaps if the characters had been more interesting, I might have cared more about what happened. All the usual suspects were accounted for: the lone survivor, the scientific disbeliever, the spiritualist, and the sadistic dead man. For most of the book, Fischer, the lone survivor, the greatest source of first-hand information the investigators have, does nothing. His main goal is to protect himself even as he watches the house destroy Dr. Barrett, Edith, and Florence Tanner as it had the group he watched die in the house. The spiritualist embraced the house blindly, allowing the house manipulate her because she refused to open her eyes to the menace lurking in house even when it physically attacked her. Seriously? This woman didn’t realize it would be a bad idea to have sex with a ghost? And the scientist was so sure about his work, so sure that his special machine could end hauntings, he refused to pay attention to all the evidence around him things weren’t going as well as he thought they might. If they listened to each other and listen to the house, Dr. Barrett and Florence Tannwouldn’t have died, and they could have ended the haunting in the house together.