Richard Matheson: "The Children of Noah," "Lemmings," and "Long Distance Call"

Remember back in 2022 when we read Richard Matheson's collection Shock 2 over the course of three blog posts (Un Deux Trois)?  The last few days the first volume in the Shock series has come to mind--I saw a copy of an edition of it at an antiques store, and noticed "Lemmings" in the same issue of F&SF as a Mark Clifton story I read, "Remembrance and Reflection."  So let's read it!  Shock!, a collection of 1950s stories, was printed in 1961 with a cool Richard Powers cover and would be reprinted numerous times behind various other covers, sometimes as Shock I.  We'll read the stories in the order they appear in the book, though I won't be reading them from a copy of Shock!, as I don't own such a thing.

"The Children of Noah" (1957)

This one first appeared in an issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and is included in two 21st-century Matheson collections I purchased at book sales at Iowa libraries like ten years ago, 2002's Nightmare at 20,000 Feet and 2005's Collected Stories Vol. 2.  Collected Stories Vol. 2 has little remarks from Matheson at the end of each story, and stupidly, I glanced at the six lines in italics after "The Children of Noah," lines which give away the ending, so this story didn't work as well on me as it might have. 

"The Children of Noah" is a lot like that species of Lovecraftian story set in a remote New England town and inhabited by sinister people under the malign influence of an alien culture, though stripped of any supernatural or extraterrestrial or extradimensional component.  Matheson is an able writer, and he does a good job with the images and describing the protagonist's emotions and thought processes.

Mr. Ketchum hails from the greatest state in the union, and is an overweight man with few friends, relatives or work colleagues; he lives alone in Newark and makes a living at conducting some vague freelance business of some kind.  He has been driving through New England on a disappointing vacation when he is stopped in a tiny seaside town in Maine for speeding.  Most of the story consists of Ketchum, held in custody by the local cops, slowly learning about the town by looking paintings on the walls of the places he finds himself in and by talking to the prominent local citizens who have him in custody.  He eventually realizes that the town is named after a sea captain who married a South Sea Islander, a woman with filed teeth, and that the town's descendants consist of mixed race people who have maintained the cannibal traditions of their foreign ancestors, and that the protein to be served at the next big town barbecue is none other than Ketchum himself!

I guess these stories in which white people learn to their detriment how alien--and how dangerous--people from nonwhite cultures really are run counter to the ethos of current intellectual fashion, but I like them anyway when they are well-done.  (Maybe "The Children of Noah" will be more palatable to the 2024 educated elite if we characterize it as being about how dangerous small town rural America is for city folk, an attitude expressed in the story by soon-to-be-main-course Ketchum.)

Thumbs up!

"Lemmings" (1958)

This story is just two pages long and it is still a waste of time, a simple idea rather than a story.  People start walking into the sea to die for no reason whatsoever.  Two characters talk about this, bringing up the famous rodents said to do this; at the start of the story these two guys don't understand why people are killing themselves this way, but by the end of the story they are joining in.  Matheson makes no effort to explain why this might happen.

Pointless gimmick story, thumbs down.  (I can endorse the Van Der Graaf Generator song "Lemmings," however.) 

This story gets a big smh from the MPorcius staff, but editors of anthologies in many languages have embraced it.  Go figure.

"The Splendid Source" (1956)

The third story in Shock! is "Splendid Source," a joke story that appeared in Playboy and which I read back in 2018 and dismissed as a waste of time.  Two strikes in a row for Shock!

"Long Distance Call" (1953)

This story made its debut in H. L. Gold's Beyond Fantasy Fiction under the title "Sorry, Right Number" and has been a big success for Matheson, appearing in many anthologies and even serving as the basis for an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "The Night Call."

On a dark and stormy night, the telephone of an invalided old maiden lady rings, but when she picks up there is no one on the line.  This keeps happening, and over the course of a few days a man begins talking to the old woman, repeating without emotion banal but appropriate phrases, ignoring her responses.  First he just says "Hello" but then works his way up to "I want to talk to you."  It takes the old woman a while--they have been busy with the damage wreaked by the storm--but eventually she gets the telephone company to investigate.  The telephone company reports that a broken line must somehow be causing the ringing, but they are positive the old woman could not have been hearing a voice through her receiver, as the fallen line was not connected to any phone--it had fallen into a cemetery.

Matheson does a good job making being old and bedridden seem horrible, and communicating to the reader the old spinster's anxiety and frustration over how people seem to be ignoring or disbelieving her pleas, and of course the fact that she has no means of investigating the mystery herself.  The story's problem, from my perspective, comes with the ending, and the lack of explanation for what is going on (a problem the story shares with "Lemmings.")  The old woman gets another call, and the last line of the story relates what she hears, the voice saying "Hello, Miss Elva.  I'll be right over."  The idea that a body is going to bust out of its grave, or a ghost or spirit rise from Hell or wherever, and come visit the defenseless old woman, is sort of scary, but it is not like we have had any indication that the dead person has any relationship with Miss Elva, or how a telephone line might bring the dead back to life or contact beings in the afterlife or anything like that, so it doesn't ring true, can't stand up under further consideration after the initial chill of fear has passed.

According to wikipedia, the TV version of the story solves this problem by having the line fall on the grave of Miss Elva's fiance, who died years ago right before they were to be married, and abandoning the "I'll be right over" line.  It seems like instead of Miss Elva being a pathetic invalid, as in the story, in the TV show Miss Elva is a domineering personality who drives people away from her by acting like a jerk; this shifts the central theme of the work from the fear of the weak to the self-defeating nature of being a nagging bitch, changing the protagonist from an innocent victim into a person who is punished for her bad character and poor decisions.

**********

We're off to a roller coater start with two well-written stories and two clunkers; there are 13 stories in Shock!, so Matheson has plenty of time to rack up a positive score.  Expect to see more from Shock! soon here at MPorcius Fiction Log (but first, 1950s stories from a different, but perhaps equally familiar, SF personality.)