Hell House: The Horror of Bad Sentence Construction

February 12, 2016

My last post was an ode to the passionate and enthusiastic “meh,” that The Haunting of Hill House provoked in my soul. I enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s prose, mood, and characterization, but the story didn’t really stir up my loins. Not that I really wanted my loins stirred.

I had almost the opposite experience with Hell House. While the ending was a bit odd, author Richard Matheson (of I am Legend fame) creates an interesting mythology and story that had me legitimately interested to find out the secret of Hell House.

On the other hand, the prose made me want to light myself on fire, so it was a mixed bag.

Look folks, I don’t consider myself the perfect grammarian by any means. I abuse the English language frequently and in peculiar ways. I justify these crimes with the knowledge that I am at least able to use a variety of sentence constructions.

By my estimate, approximately 1,200% of Hell House was written with this exact sentence structure:

“Passionately desiring to excite tension in his readers, Matheson repeatedly tacked a gerund phrase onto the front every sentence in the book.”

It got so bad that by about half-way through the book, I started involuntarily saying “fuck you” out loud every time I saw one of these things, which I hereby dub “Mathies.”

There are so many unnecessary modifiers used in these sentences too, and it’s not just in exposition either. There are so many Swifties in this thing. Every other dialogue tag is “she groaned angrily” or something like that.

And look, I get that the Anti-Adverb Mafia sometimes goes a bit overboard with the virtual prohibition against “-ly” words in modern fiction, but there is a certain point where it just seems like you’re reading a Dick and Jane book. A Dick and Jane book about a haunted old orgy house that can only be cleared by making fun of the ghost until he leaves for the afterlife.

Hey, have you ever seen the 1990s Saturday Night Live skit with Will Farrell offering a pet training video called “Diss Your Dog?” Check it out. It’s pretty funny.

What does this have to do with Hell House? Well, it turns out that this particular technique also works on ghosts.

Emeric Belasco is the former owner and current haunter of Hell House. After ghost-killing spiritual medium Florence and paranormal scientician Dr. Barrett for trying to get rid of him with some kind of anti-ghost science device, and the power of God (respectively), Belasco is tired. He’s so tired that he can’t even kill Barrett’s wife Edith or another medium named Ben Fischer.

Seeing his opportunity, Fischer starts making fun of Belasco about his height which inexplicably works for some unstated readon. You see, Belasco was actually quite sensitive about how short he was, so much so that in life he’d even had surgical leg extension surgery (which I don’t think was an actual thing in the 1920s).

Aaaand… that’s pretty much it. After being weakened by Barrett’s de-ghostulator and two failed murderhauntings, Belasco just kind of sobs off to Valhalla or wherever under a barrage of insults.

While Belasco’s ultimate defeat was kind of underwhelming, the lore and history of the house was still pretty interesting at least. Evidently back in the day, Belasco was world-renowned for his ability to throw a top-notch party/orgy/human sacrifice/wine tasting and the bad juju from those little shindigs were able to fuel Belasco’s postmortem murder spree for several decades. So that was kind of cool.

The subject matter of Hell House, while not particularly ground-breaking, was at least engaging and interesting. I’ll probably never want to pick the book up again, because those Mathies will already haunt my dreams for the next decade or so as it is.

Shuddering fearfully at the memory of irritating prose, I definitively end my blog entry once and for all.

Written by michaelkingram Posted in Uncategorized