The title, the characters, the plot- nearly every feature of the original has been painstakingly recreated in much stupider form.
It presents an unrelentingly coarse, painfully deliberate enstupiding of Shirley Jackson’s novel. The book does indeed appear to intentionally parallel The Haunting of Hill House, operating on roughly the level of a Mad Magazine style spoof, or perhaps more accurately one of those porn movies that parodize other films-the kind with names like Brassiere to Eternity. If the female characters weren’t all grown women, this could be a Piers Anthony novel. This book is Battlefield Earth-quality stupid. It is a perfect example of the Idiot Plot, populated by sublimely stupid characters whose only purpose is to make the stupidest possible choices at the worst possible times. It is lavishly, ostentatiously, relentlessly stupid, literally from first page to last. Today I am returned among you to bear witness: *Hell House * may be the stupidest book ever to exist. Last night, as the shadows lengthened and the last pale gleam of twilight faded at last into dusk, the heavy silence broken only by the mournful cry of the whippoorwhill, I immersed myself in the experience that is Hell House. I seem to recall encountering a quote from Matheson that specifically contrasted the largely psychological, ambiguous atmosphere of Hill House with his own novel, which instead presented a haunted house where “you damned well know it’s haunted” (or words to that effect-I have been unable to track down the source of the quote, and concede that it may be pure hallucination.) However, I’d been given to understand that it was intended as a sort of counterpoint to Shirley Jackson’s classic. Somehow I’d never gotten around to reading Hell House, or of seeing the movie based on the novel. So when I ran across a copy of Richard Matheson’s *Hell House * the other day, it seemed like the perfect choice. This year I’ve got haunted houses on the brain, both from recently rereading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and also from touring a few of the local haunted attractions. With Halloween just around the corner, it seemed appropriate to seek out some horripilating holiday-themed reading.
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