I read Richard Matheson's "Hell House" last month. I'm not a horror expert; my dips into the horror genre have been fairly shallow. One of the first horror novels I did read was Clive Barker's "Coldheart Canyon" well over ten years ago. So Matheson's older deep haunted historic home story, in which a hippie woo medium, a limpdick scientist and his much younger wife, and a bitter recovering medium, feels pretty tame in comparison, which is likely unfair to "Hell House". I've also read Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" which is an extremely unfair comparison in terms of prose and atmosphere and hypnotic dread.
It does ask the question "is there anything worse than how polio keeps your dick from getting hard and so you can't fuck your wife?" The answer seems to be unsure, but it's equally upsetting/horrifying as lesbians and nearly dying in a sauna, so. There's that.