"The Distributor" (1958)

Tooling around the internet, I see this Richard Matheson story absolutely exalted by some. Heck, I found it originally in the My Favorite Horror Story anthology as the choice of F. Paul Wilson (The Keep), who provides an excitable foreword and afterword. I also found a Goodreads reviewer who puts it among the five best short stories ever written. But I think I'm closer to another Goodreads reviewer who praised it as more like black comedy. It's chilling, of course, but it's also farcical. A man moves into a neighborhood and sets out to engineer discord among his new neighbors. To their faces he is generous and sympathetic, but he's actually busy with lots of specific projects. He mails them poison pen letters, tears up their gardens at night, paints obscenities on their doors. The story is shot through with bolts of ugly racism. Some of these neighbors are not so nice, having affairs or might be. Most have secrets of some kind. Our main guy manipulates them, harasses them with unwanted deliveries, reports them to the police, drugs them, takes pictures, blackmails them. In typical Matheson form these things just happen; he reports them. This guy is amazingly efficient in his work, artifact of Matheson's straightforward and unadorned delivery, not to mention the complexity of the schemes. The story has so many characters it's hard to keep them straight as each plunges into their own downfall. Matheson simply keeps reporting the outrageous events and moving them along. Wilson sees Matheson's flat writing style as the key to what makes the story work so well: "All horror fiction I'd read until then pulsed with vibrant emotion—rage, hate, fear, lust for revenge. 'The Distributor' has none of that," he writes. "And that's what makes it so horrifying." Matheson's story does have a certain amount of power but, contrary to Wilson, I think it's less prescient and more rote about how bad things happen, suggesting it's all a little Pavlovian (and maybe it is!). There's a case for this story chipping in its part to documenting our great American unraveling since approximately 1958. Our "distributor" guy sort of stands in for the great rightwing termite machine, which never sleeps and is always working to sow division and hatred.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg
Story not available online.