The driving rain, the cold, the two-hour ride from Manhattan in one of Deutsch’s long black leather-upholstered limousines.

He felt rather like a character in some latter-day Gothic romance. It had been raining hard since five o’clock that morning. For one night, Barrett and his colleagues investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townsfolk refer to it as the Hell House.Īt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. Lionel Barrett, the physicist, accompanied by the mediums, travel to the Belasco House in Maine, which has been abandoned and sealed since 1949 after a decade of drug addiction, alcoholism, and debauchery. But when Deutsch, a wealthy magazine and newspaper publisher, starts thinking seriously about his impending death, he offers to pay a physicist and two mediums, one physical and one mental, $100,000 each to establish the facts of life after death.ĭr. It looms over the rest the way the mountains loom over the foothills.' - Stephen Kingįrom the author of I Am Legend comes Richard Matheson's Hell House, the basis for the supernatural horror film starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill. The story is filled with supernatural occurrences and violence, including sexual violence.'Hell House is the scariest haunted house novel ever written. But whoever or whatever exists in the house has other plans and considers any of the living who enter toys to be played with and eventually destroyed. The other medium is a beautiful redhead who is the leader of a spiritualist church and has her own plans to clear the house of the ghosts that linger there. His wife, though warned about the dangers, is more afraid of being away from her husband and will not leave his side. The physicist, not believing in ghosts, has invented a machine to clear the house of what he believes is residual noxious energy from past horrendous behavior that occurred there. It is now 1970 and the one, now older, surviving member of the 1940s group is one of the mediums willing to reenter the house to overcome his fear and defeat the evil that permeates the house. Two former expeditions into the house, one in the early 1930s and another in the early 1940s had both ended in insanity or death.

The small group is made up of four people - a somewhat crippled by polio physicist, his mousy wife and two mediums. This book follows an established horror trope where an old, wealthy man, wanting to know if life really continues after death, offers to pay a large sum to a small group to spend a week in a extremely dangerous haunted house.

Hell house by richard matheson