Hell House vs. Hill House

Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

Two library books sit side by side on my coffee table. Both about haunted mansions left empty for decades and what happens to the groups of strangers who investigate them. Both follow four characters—one scientist, two sensitives, and one average person. Many of the scenes have a strange ring of déjà vu—Matheson’s Florence recoils away from the chapel the same way Jackson’s Eleanor does from the library. The first three words of one title is in a smaller, less-conspicuous font, so at first glance even their titles look the same: Hill House and Hell House. I don’t think Richard Matheson makes any apologies about his novel being a knockoff of Shirley Jackson’s. It may have been his attempt to do it right, since his book avoids many of the problems I had with The Haunting of Hill House. His book, though an improvement in many ways, lacks in some ways that Shirley Jackson’s does not.

For starters, Matheson’s characters are compelling because they’re each well-developed and complex of their own right, and each has a well-defined goal that hinges upon surviving the experience. Florence, a mental medium, wants the payout money—one hundred thousand dollars—for her church. Dr. Barrett wants to prove the legitimacy of his work and his theories. Edith doesn’t want to be separated from her husband, lest she suffer crippling anxiety, the account of which gives us an early warning that she’s dealing with emotional instability. And Fischer (whom I keep wanting to call Luke due to his relatively passive role) wants to unload the emotional baggage that’s plagued him since his first traumatic visit to the house. He says he’s sticking it out for the money, but he really wants to best Emeric Belasco and prove his individual worth. And that focus on his worth—proving himself—his ego—is a set up for his insight to what drives Belasco, and to what will be Belasco’s undoing.

Matheson’s characters ping off each other in a reasonably interesting fashion and everybody possesses likeable qualities, but they don’t enjoy the witty repartee that Shirley Jackson’s characters do. Matheson’s characters experience interesting divisive circumstances, but since they’d never experienced the playful closeness of Jackson’s characters, the relationship arc seems less dramatic.

The clearest difference, though, that I see between these two books is mood. The two authors manage tension in completely different fashions. I complained that Shirley Jackson allowed the tension to dissipate too much—that she actively dismantled it—between scenes. But her scary scenes did the job of invoking fear (except for art-hating Philistines like Michael Ingram.) Jackson uses fear of solitude and fears of the unnatural and the unknown to excellent effect. Matheson, on the other hand, never really allows the reader to let his or her guard down—weird stuff could happen at any moment, day or night—but there aren’t very many fear-invoking scenes. The overall reader feel was one of interest, anxiety and concern, even, but not actually fear. Either I’m becoming very rapidly inured to ghost stories (which I doubt, because I’m a wimp) or Hell House is an example of revealing too much of the monster.  “Once you can see ‘it,’ your brain can quantify it and it becomes less frightening” (Johnson, 102).

Despite the absence of humor and fear elements, Hell House is the stronger of the two books on the basis of there not being anything glaringly wrong with it. The hook is still great, the tension is consistent, the characters are complex, and the plot took several turns I didn’t expect. I prefer the more modern close-third POV to Jackson’s impersonal omniscient. Both books, though, are worth reading and have earned spots on my shelf. The library books go back tomorrow, right about when I expect Amazon to deliver their replacements.

Works Cited

Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Johnson, Scott. “Blurring the Line: How Reality Helps Build Better Fiction.” Many Genres One Craft. Ed. Michael A. Arnzen and Heidi Ruby Miller. Terra Alta: Headline Books, Inc. 100-104. Print

Matheson, Richard. Hell House. New York: Tor, 1999. Print.