Richard Matheson's Shock II: Part Three

Just three stories to go in Shock II, the Richard Matheson collection we are reading here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  With ten stories behind us, our grading sheet records eight stories that deserve passing grades (two or three of which pass with distinction) and two failures.  Maybe these last three tales "from the dark side of the imagination," which take up like 75 pages, will raise Matheson's average for this semester.

"Crickets" (1960)

"Crickets" first hopped into view in the pages of Shock, a magazine that produced three issues.  This is my chance to tell you I always find Jack Davis's work uninteresting and uninspiring.  Davis' productions generate no emotion because they are so obviously a joke--the representations of monsters or gore elicit no fear or disgust, the depictions of men or women arouse no affection, admiration or desire, because every single Jack Davis image is like a caricature, a goof or a mockery that lacks a single shred of genuine feeling and puts distance between the viewer and the topic or theme presented, a distance that neuters any energy inherent in the subject so depicted.  Davis' style perhaps makes sense for broad satire and juvenile jokes based on puns about current events, but is totally inappropriate for any kind of adventure or horror story, so I find him an odd choice to do the covers of Shock, if we assume the stories in the magazine are sincere efforts to thrill or unnerve readers.     

Back to "Crickets."  A couple are on vacation by a lake.  They meet a fellow guest, a man who tells them that the crickets' songs are messages, something akin to Morse Code.  This weirdo has cracked the code, and explains that the crickets are calling out the names of the dead, that the crickets are controlled by the dead.  Why the dead find it worthwhile to transmit their names to the living in a form totally incomprehensible is not explained. 

Anyway, this guy, the next day, accosts the couple again, saying that the crickets have started singing his name, and he is scared.  The couple think he is a nut, but, of course, late at night they hear him scream and hurry to his room to find him dying, covered in hundreds of bloody cricket-bites.  His last words are an indication that the crickets are now chirping out one letter at a time the names of the couple.  Time to stock up on Deep Woods Off.

Like several of the stories in Shock II, "Crickets" is just an idea that is not deeply explored and does not make a lot of sense.  It is not even internally consistent--are the dead broadcasting their own names or the names of those they are going to slay?  Why would they do both?  Why do they feel the need to kill the people who know what they are doing?  The idea of cricket song as a means of communication is not bad, but it would work better in a sword and sorcery setting where a vampire or wizard was using the crickets to command his legions or something like that.

Acceptable filler.  "Crickets" has appeared in a few anthologies including Michael Sissons' In the Dead of Night, where you can also find Ray Bradbury's famous "Small Assassin." 

"Mute" (1962)     

Insidious evil lurks within every one of us!  Well, at least that is what is alleged by the text on the cover of The Fiend in You, the paperback anthology edited by Charles Beaumont in which "Mute" first saw print.  The Fiend in You also features Robert Bloch's "Lucy Comes to Stay," which I have already read, and stories by Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury and Beaumont himself I would be interested in reading, all behind a solid Richard Powers cover.

"Mute" starts with brief mysterious scenes of a German (uh oh) professor (uh oh again) arriving in small town America to look for some people, immigrants to the land of the free and the home of the brave who are involved in some kind of unspecified experiment.

The main body of the longish story begins with a remote house burning down, killing two of the people that professor is looking for, the parents of a seven-year-old boy; the boy survives.  The boy's name is Paal, but he can't even say his own name--his parents refused to send him to school, he cannot say a single word nor understand a word of English or any other language.  We readers learn that Paal is some kind of psyker who can read minds, but that this ability is jammed if people around him talk.  His parents never spoke to him, but transmitted info and carried on conversations with him via telepathy--telepathy, Matheson suggests, is a rich and evocative method of communication, besides which mere words are dead husks, sterile and inert.  (It is always remarkable to see a professional writer attacking language and the written word, his very stock in trade--we saw this with John Wyndham in Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids, you will recall.)

The sheriff of the small town decides Paal will stay with him and his wife until they figure out who should get custody of the boy.  From the post office he acquires some letters sent to Paal's parents by correspondents of theirs in Europe; he writes out letters about the tragedy that has orphaned Paal to the return addresses on the envelopes, hoping to get in touch with Paal's relatives.  But the sheriff's wife is already crazy about Paal and wants to keep him--you see, she and the sheriff lost their own son, who was drowned, and Paal  is an attractive replacement!  So, she intercepts the letters and destroys them. 

They send Paal to school, which is a living hell for him, as all the chatter of the kids oppresses his brain, and the mind of the school teacher, a miserable old maiden lady whose status as a virgin Matheson reminds us of again and again, is a vision of horror for Paal.  (The kind of people who administer the famous Bertholt test are going to want to throw "Mute" into the fire after those letters because the happiness of women in the story is totally reliant on their relationships with men.)  The virgin teacher senses that Paal has some kind of psychic powers, because she herself has psychic powers, and considers them a terrible burden, and tries various--ruthless!--strategies to cripple Paal's psychic powers and turn him into a normal boy.

On the very day that German professor arrives at the sheriff's house, Paal's defenses crumble and he starts talking--his comprehension of and now participation in language puts an end to his telepathic powers.  The German prof's project exploring the theory that humans are all naturally telepathic but this ability was short circuited by the invention of language is ruined.  The professor admits to himself that perhaps this is for the best--Paal's birth parents didn't really love him, just thought of him as a particularly sympathetic guinea pig, while the sheriff's wife truly loves Paal and maybe love and human happiness are more important than expanding the reach of science.

Pretty good--the tale excites real human feeling and Matheson does a good job of trying to convey to the reader the experience of being a telepath and of being one or another type of unhappy woman.  The characters, like the plot, exhibit a realistic moral ambiguity--they do things that are clearly wrong but which they think are justifiable because they serve what they consider (perhaps selfishly) to be higher goals, and we readers may be persuaded to agree.  Thumbs up for "Mute." 

Besides in numerous Matheson collections, "Mute" has been reprinted in a few anthologies, including a Twilight Zone anthology on which Matheson actually gets credit as one of three editors--it turns out "Mute" was turned into an episode of the TV show, one which I have totally forgotten.

"From Shadowed Places" (1960)

Dr. Jennings' daughter Patricia is engaged to a rich guy with a beautiful Manhattan apartment.  This dude, Peter Lang, is a big game hunter who goes on safaris.  The doctor gets a desperate phone call from Patricia--Lang is terribly ill!  Jennings finds the apartment a shambles, Lang naked, Patricia desperately preventing him from killing himself.  For months Lang has had seizures and pains, and they are now so severe he wants to die.  Several specialists have examined the man, could find nothing medically wrong with him--of course they couldn't, because his agony is the product of black magic!

At Columbia, Patricia had a friend, Lurice Howell, a black woman who did field work in Africa.  Patricia calls up Dr. Howell, now an anthropology professor, and she comes over to save the day.  When she was abroad she became close with a woman witch doctor and this adept taught Howell all her secrets--in fact, Howell got so integrated into the magic-using community over there that she herself suffered the same kind of curse Lang is now going through--she feels his pain!  Howell performs a ritual to free Lang of the curse inflicted on him by a Zulu sorcerer, and Matheson pushes the lengthy magic scene to the limit.  Howell performs the ritual naked, and we hear all about how her "voluptuous" breasts move as she dances.  As part of the ritual Lang has to give Howell payment--he gives her a ring Patricia gifted to him!  The climax of the spell is when Howell straddles Lang and he ejaculates the curse into her!  All while Lang's fiancé and future father-in-law watch!  Howell, somehow, shrugs off the curse after writhing around a bit.  (This is the weak part of the story.)

After Matheson has spent the entire story exploiting white people's fears of and fascinations with black people's sexuality and their supposed closer relationship with nature (as well as titillating us with depictions of womanly jealousy and scenes of voyeuristic and BDSM fetishism) on the final pages he administers the medicine that goes with our heaping spoonful of (brown) sugar--Howell quotes a poem by Countee Cullen and suggests she took on this arduous task in hopes of building a bridge between the races.

This is a pretty good black magic story and there is obviously a lot of race/sexuality/gender stuff to chew on.  I'm glad I could finish up Shock II on a story that is provocative and full of human emotion and feels like it was rigorously crafted and not just a half-baked throwaway based on a kooky idea.

"From Shadowed Places" debuted in the all-star 11th anniversary issue of F&SF, and would be reprinted in anthologies on the theme of black magic as well as many Matheson collections.

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Alright, thirteen stories, four or five that are good and only two that are actually bad.  I found that it got off to a slow start, but Shock II is definitely worth checking out.