So, I did find the book.  Richard Matheson’s Hell House is somewhat of a classic, but, my usual complaint holds—it’s a bit too long.  It lingers too much over the various characters’ motivations and doubts.  It probably doesn’t help that I watched the movie first.  The screenplay was also written by Matheson, so it is fairly similar to the book.  Matheson had a history of writing for the screen.  He wrote several Twilight Zone episodes (indeed, Rod Serling blurbed the copy of the book I have).  The story is the same: a scientist and his wife, accompanied by two mediums (one mental and one physical), are sent to Hell House to demonstrate if there is an afterlife or not.  The scientist plans to prove that, although psychic power is real, it is merely electromagnetic radiation, not a survival of personality.  He has a machine that will demonstrate this.

Meanwhile the four spend the week at Hell House being tormented by ghosts.  Each member of the party winds up injured and two of them are killed.  In the end it turns out that ghosts do use (are made of) electromagnetic radiation and they are continuations of the spirits of the dead.  Only, at Hell House, there is one exceptionally powerful ghost.  One that makes others think there are many.  It’s a bit disappointing that the motivation for his evil behavior is that Belasco resented being short.  Those of us who are vertically challenged aren’t all sociopaths.  People can obsess over size, I know, but to what lengths would someone go?  Trying to haunt a house until eternity?  One thing the novel does explain better than the movie is Belasco’s overweening pride in being a giant of a man.  In reality, he’s maybe my stature.

Both the book and the movie use the Bible to help resolve the mystery, earning the latter a place in Holy Sequel.  Matheson was an influential writer in the horror genre.  I have to believe he was inspired by Shirley Jackson for this particular tale.  I found his I Am Legend a bit faster reading—another novel I read after seeing one or two of the film adaptations.  For some reason it felt shorter.  Having one person left in the world, an idea that was pondered by Mary Shelley in The Last Man, leaves plenty of room for pondering motives and psychology.  Maybe Hell House suffers for having four people to probe a little too deeply.  In any case, I’m glad to have read the book—it explained in a way the movie left a bit ambiguous, that both the scientist and the spiritualists were right in the end.