The Shrinking Man (1956)

Richard Matheson’s next novel after I Am Legend went on to become one of the great 1950s science fiction movies, huffing up the title to The Incredible Shrinking Man. Matheson wrote the screenplay and, in fact, improves the story by making it much more straightforward in time. This novel is constantly hopping all over the place, from when the main guy, the shrinking man, is trapped in the cellar, missing and presumed dead by his family, to sections labeled by his height: 68”, 35”, etc. It feels similarly unfocused by perspective. Sometimes things seem larger or smaller than they should from descriptions in the same passage. I could also do without the masculine panic as he goes from 6’2” to subatomic, which reminds me of another complaint, this thing about shrinking proportionally at the rate of 1/7” per day. WTF is 1/7”? Just say an inch per week and leave the rest of the math to us. On the other hand most of this takes place in the previous week, so maybe that’s what you have to do. Another point that worried me is the sense that the structure of the novel by definition makes the timeline 74 weeks, from 74 inches to nil. It wasn’t that clear and I had the sense more time was elapsing, maybe even years, but maybe Matheson was true to the concept after all. The Shrinking Man is thus disorienting but not necessarily in good ways. Maybe I’m not the one to ask. I didn’t go much for I Am Legend either. Matheson is a good, active writer and still highly readable even when he can feel a little lost here. There are too many Hemingwayesque issues with masculinity and it is too easily read in contexts that developed after 1956 as panic about losing positions of power men had previously dominated. To be clear, I don’t think Matheson thought of it consciously that way at all, but that’s where his imagination went. He liked the possibilities of steady shrinkage (as George Costanza once yelped) and somehow it became something about satisfying women (that is, pacifying them). Matheson is famous for an ugly imagination. His vampire stories are particularly hard for me to read. This one manages to evade a lot of that, but I take the movie, with its own flaws, as Matheson’s second draft, with improvements. Hard to talk about fears of sexual inadequacy in a 1950s movie, which also helps.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

“Duel” (1971)

This story by Richard Matheson is a classic that served as the source for a TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg early in his career, which itself is considered a kind of classic. And it is pretty much for the same reasons as the story, which is that it only tells you what you have to know, and all the action is concrete, visual or easily describable, and almost unbearably tense. It’s in anthologies all over the place. I read it in Foundations of Fear, edited by David G. Hartwell, whose preface to the story says, “Without a hint of science fiction or an overt whiff of the supernatural, ‘Duel’ manages to invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly shocking, compelling, fantastic.” ISFDB confirms in a general way, classifying the story into its “non-genre” basement, but three voters and I have combined to rate it an 8.25 of 10. That means it’s good. It’s also very scary and induces feelings of frustration and helplessness. You probably know the story: a guy is driving a two-lane highway west to San Francisco for an important meeting that afternoon. He encounters a semitruck tanker with a trailer whose driver evidently gets mad when our guy passes him. He begins to toy with him and even threaten his life using the truck. Whenever our guy pulls off to let the truck get some miles down the road, he always finds the truck parked on the shoulder a mile or two down, waiting for him. Lots of strong elements showing Matheson at his best. The facelessness and anonymity of the truck driver makes it all seem more effective. The fact that so many of us know road rage from both sides is used well here (even if 1971 somehow seems early for road rage). Hartwell is right that Matheson makes the truck itself a terrible thing to see, though I was always aware there was a driver and he was the aggravating factor. I see the problem in calling this story horror, yet I think you have to. It raises profound anxiety and dread. In many ways that’s what horror is—all it is. This story is a prime exhibit in that argument. The human cruelty is tempered and deliberate, rather than a moment’s impulse. That also makes this story insanely creepy. Have to look at the movie again.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

I Am Legend (1954)

This compact novel by Richard Matheson—really, at about 100 pages, it’s more like a long story, or novella—may have been oversold to me a little. While generally quite well done in the boiled-down Matheson style, the story never quite reached me. What I found most interesting about it, and a little surprising, is that it’s mainly a vampire tale. Yes, it has the zombie element too—these monsters crowd together and lurch around like zombies and there are many of them. But they are explicitly vampires. I give the first movie version, The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, more credit for creating recognizable George Romero-style zombies. But then Romero also cited I Am Legend as an influence, so there you go. Something in the air, something in the water. As a postapocalyptic story it has much the doomy feel of many Twilight Zone episodes to come (some of which Matheson wrote). Our guy, as the first movie’s retitle puts it, is the last man on earth as far as he knows. He spends his days scavenging for goods and reinforcing the barricades on his house. At night the creatures come out and howl for him, pounding at his door. He reads Dracula by Bram Stoker and considers all the vampire lore the creatures confirm. They shun sunlight, recoil from garlic, mirrors, and crosses. They want blood. The basic thrust of the story is our guy’s scientific investigation into them. There are flashbacks to his sad life, a wife and daughter taken by this plague. He buried his wife and then she came back. I wanted more on her “second chapter” but all we learn is he’s sure she’s gone for good. Maybe he got her with a wooden stake—more vampire lore that is used in an interesting way here. There is another sad episode with a non-vampire dog. The story spans a few years, specifically January 1976 to January 1979, focusing on four periods in his life. There’s a climax when a woman shows up, which feels mechanical as much as anything. Three major film versions have been made: the 1964, The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). I’ve only seen the first and then I was more distracted by the obvious influence on Romero. I’m not sure Matheson’s novel actually lends itself well to film treatments, but they keep trying and now I’m curious about the other two. There may be too much concept here requiring exposition. Matheson, ever the trafficker in brutality, also provides an unpleasant sexual charge, with female vampires trying to entice our guy with lewd gestures. This leaves him thinking about sex more than he or any of us would like. I Am Legend is on many short lists of best horror novels of all time. I can’t go all that way. Maybe this is one you have to decide for yourself. It’s good and dirty, the way Matheson does, and I’m happy enough I took a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

“Big Surprise” (1959)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story turned out to be a big surprise indeed for me. I hadn’t known he wrote the story (or the screenplay that came of it) for a Night Gallery episode that first ran in November 1971 and scared me silly. Not everyone had the same reaction, but it worked very well on me. As usual “scary” is at once the most personal and the most subjective element of all in horror. Anything that has scared anyone badly enough is sure to be weak sauce to someone else. Still, the way the phrase “big surprise” was used in that Night Gallery piece (of maybe 11 minutes) is so memorable I thought of it when I first saw this story title all these years later, before I knew it was the source story. In a way it’s not surprising because even by 1971 I knew and treated Matheson’s name with respect as someone whose stories would get to me—scare me, disturb me, worry me over their ideas and images long after reading. Matheson had also by then been working for some time with Rod Serling, dating back to The Twilight Zone and some of its most famous episodes, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I was interested to find out this story was published originally as a “riddle story” contest in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, under the title “What Was in the Box,” with $25 awarded to the reader with the best solution for the open-ended finish. It makes me wonder—is this ending, which so unnerved me on TV, a contribution from some reader?

It’s a really simple story, deceptively so. There’s a scary old man in the neighborhood. All the neighborhood boys are afraid of him. One day he beckons one of them to come over and talk to him. He tells him if he digs in a certain spot—10 paces from an oak tree facing the church steeple—he will find a “big surprise.” The surprise turns out to be the old man himself, looming up out of a box uncovered by the digging. He is laughing and says, “Surprise!” I looked it up online a few months ago, found it on Vimeo, and watched it again (unfortunately it’s no longer there and the show appears to be mostly unavailable at this time). It’s John Carradine playing the old man, a notably good casting call in the early ‘70s. The screenplay, not surprisingly, is faithful to the story. It doesn’t work on me the same way anymore, of course, but I appreciate the craft of how it’s done. Night Gallery remains generally underrated as a TV show capable of great scares. One interesting difference between story and show is that the boy is told to dig 10 feet down in the story but only four in the show, which is actually more plausible and helps the setup. In the story you know you are really in deep but there are distracting details about cutting in steps and such. (I myself have failed in my life to ever dig a hole even four feet deep—too much work.) It’s hard for me to know how I would take this story without my experience with the TV version. I mean it really scared me—how was this thing I was seeing even possible at all? I even swore off Night Gallery awhile as a result. Now I would like to know more about the details of the original publication and the reader endings. As it is, the ending of “Big Surprise” is just the very best I could ever think of, perfect in its way—so unlikely, and somehow so terrifying.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

"Long Distance Call" (1953)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story is another nice example of a specific type of technology-related horror popular at midcentury. Let’s call it the “haunted telephone” story, reaching into the privacy of your home to make your phone ring and such. Who could be calling? Robert Aickman has a nice version in “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” (also from 1953) and there’s a host of others. In fact, the original title for this story, “Sorry, Right Number,” is a direct reference to the 1948 movie Sorry, Wrong Number, which features Barbara Stanwyck playing a disabled woman confined to bed but with an unfortunate line to the outside world in the telephone by her bedside. That movie has exactly the mood Matheson wants to set here: a little bit paranoid and a little bit helpless, and it’s all coming through the phone. Our gal in this story is much older but likewise confined to bed. The calls come in the middle of the night. At first the caller never speaks and he never hangs up. When he finally does speak, the things he says make no sense. The story is still a little scary—it made me nervous anyway, even if it’s also fairly obvious. Matheson could probably make recipe directions and technical manuals scary. The story plays explicitly with this technology that has access to our most private, intimate, and vulnerable lives. Today communications technology is ubiquitous and overwhelming, but still there are movies like Unfriended, which work similar angles with internet technology. With no caller ID in 1953, all incoming phone calls were anonymous, just the ringing of the phone. You knew some of the voices. The ones you didn’t know could be creepy until you knew who it was. Matheson leans into that and builds on it. The voice is ominous, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense, but it is ominous. So we are well softened for the ridiculous revelation that the calls are coming from a graveyard. I stayed under the story’s spell even with that, though there isn’t much more to it than that. Matheson’s habit of reaching for the darkest grim notes is compressed into the certainty of the imminent death of the woman receiving the calls. The rest is mysterious, eerie, unknowable ... on the other end of a telephone line.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Listen to story online.

"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.

"Born of Man and Woman" (1950)

This very short story with its swaggering biblical title basically launched the career of Richard Matheson in auspicious style. It was his first publication at the age of 22, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). It is a monster story of some kind, widely held as open to interpretation. As far as I can tell, the most conventional take is that the child in this story, who is keeping a diary, is deformed, born with congenital disabilities, and an innocent, and it is the parents who are hateful, abusive monsters. See Wikipedia, for example. Others (like me) read it as that thing in the basement is the monster. It oozes a green sticky substance and crawls across the walls and ceiling with multiple arms or legs. It sounds like a big freaking spider, though the clues are admittedly scant. I will grant there is something wrong with these parents. It would be bad enough if they had a monster kid and tried to hide it from the world, which I believe has happened at least in fiction, chaining and beating them and so forth. That's toxic but proceeds logically enough from shame. But these parents are giving cocktail parties and their idea of responsibility seems to be telling the thing in the basement to stay out of sight and don't make a sound. It's really messed up. Matheson is working a fine and ambiguous point of balance through misdirection and these vague but evocative (but vague) clues. This story packs quite a punch, done artfully enough to stand up to repeated reading. It's a kind of bridge piece from Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis looking forward to Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." The diary structure and child's voice also look forward to Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

I will say, yes, upon reflection, a certain smug cleverness is apparent in the specific points where Matheson draws back from revealing more. But in a way that indulgence is earned too, as the story hits like someone suddenly lighting up the organ in a dark church at night with chords you can feel rumble through your body. It has a 19th-century quality in its certainty that all it has to do is tell you such things exist, "born of man and woman." And it might also be influential in another way, opening up the routes to trauma-sourced horror that comes of of parental, school, bully, police, and other societal abuses, a theme wending through Algernon and bubbling under in horror circles until emerging again with more force in midcentury. As with many stories, "Born of Man and Woman" gets away with excesses and plot holes by a combination of brevity and chutzpah. It's just crazy enough to shock and by the time you're asking questions (hey, why don't the authorities seem to know anything about this cocktail party crack house?) it's all over. I remember Matheson well from my forays into horror when I was a kid in the '60s. His very name made me nervous to see in the books I picked up. I didn't necessarily like his stories. There was always something brutal and viscerally disturbing about his stuff. That is seen here already, in his first published story, in the large amount of time spent on the beatings this creature is taking from the parents. Matheson is using it as a way to set readers on edge and gain sympathy for the monster/narrator. We're still not entirely sure what the thing telling the story is, but it appears to have real consciousness and character and we instinctively recoil at the chains and beatings—even more so when we learn it is for the sake of a cocktail party. But the monster also kills a cat, out of a fear we can understand, but still there is the death of a cat in this story, as Matheson once again balances his elements toward ambiguity. We have enough sympathy for the monster, who after all is communicating with us, that we loathe their parents for them. Still, we have seen this thing kill, and at the end of the story it's starting to lose its temper.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Read story online.