Richard Matheson: "The Edge," "The Creeping Terror," "Death Ship," and "The Distributor"

In our last episode we finished up a collection of stories by Robert Silverberg, Dimension Thirteen, and today we finish up a collection of stories by Richard Matheson, Shock!  Back in 2015, at the very dawn of time, we read "Legion of Plotters" and said it was good.  In 2016, as life began to stir, we read "Dance of the Dead" and judged it OK.  In 2018, as man began to use tools, we read "The Splendid Source" and denounced it as a waste of time.  On April 11 of this year, the high modern age, we read "The Children of Noah," "Lemmings," and "Long Distance Call," awarding Matheson two pluses and a minus.  A week later, as society drifted into decadence, we read "Mantage," "One for the Books" and "The Holiday Man," declaring one good, one bad and one merely acceptable.  

That leaves us today, as civilization collapses all around us, with four stories to go, and Matheson at a score of 1 (four pluses, two neutrals and three negatives.)  Matheson is ahead of the game, but a run of bad luck could still find him deep underwater.  Well, let's dig these stories up at the internet archive and make our final determinations.

"The Edge" (1958)

This is a sort of obvious story, and Matheson knows it is obvious, and so does one of those "meta" "recursive" things in which the character in the story remarks to himself that "this thing that is happening to me is like the things that happen in SF magazines all the time."  It is competent, though, so I'm giving it a passing score.  

An executive who lives on Long Island and commutes daily to his Manhattan office is stressed out.  He goes to a restaurant he has never been to before in hopes of relaxing but a stranger joins him unbidden.  This stranger acts like he knows the executive, and he even knows about the exec's college career and military service, where he lives and works, the name of his wife.  The stranger seems to think the harried executive graduated a semester earlier than he really did, however.

Eventually, after a lot of conversation, the protagonist comes to suspect that he has entered a parallel universe much like his own, much like people do in the SF magazines he used to read.  His suspicions are confirmed when he gets home and his wife greets him familiarly but then answers the  phone to find on the other end a man who also claims to be her husband!

"The Edge" debuted in F&SF.  People interested in Matheson's career might find Anthony Boucher's intro to the story of value as Boucher praises Matheson not only effusively but also with some specificity: "Born of Man and Woman" was the second best first story Boucher ever read, and Matheson's speech at a convention (Boucher is not specific, but I think it was the ninth Westercon) was "the most intelligent and moving speech I have ever listened to from a guest of honor--a candid discussion of commercialism and artistic integrity."  "The Edge" has been reprinted many times in many languages.

"The Creeping Terror" AKA "A Touch of Grapefruit" (1959)

isfdb suggests this story made its initial appearance in Frederik Pohl's fifth Star anthology, where it was called "A Touch of Grapefruit."  (Maybe a pun on the phrase attributed to the Corsican Ogre?)  I'm reading it in the 1982 anthology Science Fiction A to Z: A Dictionary of Great Science Fiction Themes, where it appears under the theme "Cities" and the title "A Touch of Grapefruit" but a footnote announces "This was first published under the title The Creeping Terror."  I don't know what is going on here, if somebody someplace made a mistake or if the version of the story in Shock (1961) was revised and the version in Science Fiction A to Z is that 1961 revised version but was printed under the original 1959 title.

This is an annoying joke story in the form of an academic paper, full of joke footnotes, a satire of the powerful influence of the culture of California, specifically Los Angeles, on the rest of the United States, and I guess maybe of the rapid growth in population and geographic size of L.A. in the first half or so of the 20th century.  Citing many sources and offering numerous block quotes, the writer describes how citrus trees sprung up fully grown in the Midwest, how smog spread east to skies all over the nation, and how people all over America began to dress skimpily and became fascinated with show business, automobiles, and going to the beach.  The Northeastern states resist this creeping Californification, to limited effect.

An irritating waste of time.  Thumbs down, but I will admit that this might, perhaps, be a useful document for historians of Los Angeles, a sort of window into public perceptions of the city we call La La La Land; it is perhaps noteworthy that Matheson spent his youth in New Jersey and New York, and Pohl was also a New Yorker.

See, I don't always cherry pick the good covers to post on the blog

"Death Ship" (1953)

"Death Ship" was made into an episode of The Twilight Zone which I don't remember seeing, though I probably did.  The story is well-written, but the ending is a little disappointing.

Matheson draws the story out with lots of visual and psychological details, but the plot is simple.  Three men crew a ship that is exploring the galaxy for habitable planets.  Intelligent alien life has never been discovered, so the men are very excited to see what is likely a space ship on the surface of a planet.  At close range, sadly, it turns out to be a crashed ship, totally wrecked, and, closer still, to be an Earth ship.  Inside, they realize that the crashed ship is their own--the cockpit is occupied by their own dead bodies!

The men come up with various theories as to what is going on.  Could it be they are seeing their own future, that they are doomed to die in a crash?  Are they in some alternate universe?  Is the crashed vessel and its disturbing contents some kind of illusion conjured up by aliens who hope to scare them off?

All those theories are sort of interesting science fiction ideas, but it seems that Matheson's answer to the question of what the hell is going on is a supernatural one--the last sentence of the story, a line of dialogue uttered by one of the characters, refers to "the Flying Dutchman," and I guess we are expected to think the ship crashed and the men were killed and they--and the ship--are ghosts.

I don't find ghosts very interesting, and a ghost ship makes even less sense than a ghost person (if you believe in an immortal soul you can say the ghost is a soul divorced from its body, but who thinks a rocket ship has an immortal soul?) and ghosts feel out of place in a story that you are led to believe is "realistic" science fiction.  

(Thinking back to "Lemmings" and "Long Distance Call," a theme in Matheson's work seems to be that life is inexplicable chaos; Matheson comes up with disturbing horror scenarios and feels no need to supply a plausible explanation for why the terrible thing is happening, or any explanation at all, even suggesting that a lack of explanation makes the story more scary.  Personally, I like explanations; maybe I'm one of those "positivists.")   

"Death Ship" debuted in an issue of Fantastic Story which reprints 1940s stories by Leigh Brackett and by Henry Kuttner that I think I have never read.  Maybe I'll read them soon.  "Death Ship" has been reprinted many times in Matheson collections as well as anthologies, some with a time travel theme.  (Wait, do Harry Turtledove, Martin H. Greenberg and the Vandermeers think this is a time travel story and not a ghost story?  Are there different versions of this story with different endings floating around like the different versions of David Gerrold's Yesterday's Children / Starhunt?)  

"The Distributor" (1958)

isfdb calls "The Distributor" "non-genre," and it appeared first in Playboy.  We've actually already read a story from this issue of our most prestigious skin rag, the groaningly lame "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" by Richard Gehman, one of Judith Merril's favorite stories (she included it in her SF: Best of the Best anthology.)  Speaking of favorite stories, "The Distributor" is the favorite horror story of F. Paul Wilson, a famous and important guy I know very little about--Wilson introduces "The Distributor" in the 2000 anthology My Favorite Horror Story.  Besides scads of Matheson collections, you can also find "The Distributor" in one of those Alfred Hitchcock branded anthologies and Playboy anthologies

"The Distributor" is an emotionlessly retailed catalog of more or less realistic misdemeanors and atrocities set in a suburb; the motivations of the perpetrator of the crimes is mysterious, and I am not sure what the point of the story is, other than to remind us of how vulnerable we all are to clever evil people and to reiterate the standard criticisms of suburbanites, that they are racist and hypocritical and houseproud and overly suspicious of each other and whatever.

A guy moves into a suburban neighborhood and launches a carefully orchestrated one-man campaign to sow dissension, trigger suicide and instigate murder among the inhabitants, a campaign consisting of a mind-numbing number of concurrent and sometimes complex operations.  He sabotages a guy's garden and makes it look like someone else did it.  He drugs a woman and rapes her.  He drugs a woman and takes nude photos of her for use in blackmail.  He shoots a dog and makes it look like a kid did it.  He has pornographic materials mailed to some Christian.  He makes a woman suspect her husband is cheating on her.  He shocks a woman with a weak heart so she has a heart attack.  He paints a racial slur on one guy's house, makes a bigot think his neighbor is an African-American who has been passing for white.  When a woman suspects he is the source of all the recent trouble he wins her sympathy by claiming he is a Holocaust survivor.  And on and on.  Having ruined the lives of everybody in the neighborhood, he leaves; the story has no real climax or resolution, no emotional highs and lows, it is just a straight line from point A to point B.

Stories about crime often seek to entertain the reader by providing a cathartic narrative that culminates in the achievement of justice.  We witness people misbehaving, and then witness them being punished, and are relieved to see justice done and order restored.  Crime stories that seek to be "sophisticated" or shocking or subversive will flip the script a little, will suggest that it is society that is unjust and portray the criminal as the hero, as the one who is satisfying justice by breaking the rules and punishing the corrupt establishment, but such a story is still essentially about righting wrongs.  "The Distributor" doesn't provide that catharsis or sense of justice--the perpetrator of the crimes is never punished, and (at least some of) the suburbanites who get killed or otherwise injured don't seem bad enough to deserve the horrible "punishment" they suffer.

Crime stories often seek to entertain by thrilling the reader, by manipulating his emotions with scenes of suspense born of uncertainty--will the victim survive the attack? will the detective sneaking around the villains' lair be discovered? will help arrive in time? who is the killer?--and disgusting or titillating scenes of sex and violence.  Matheson does a little of that here, with the scene in which the distributor throws somebody of his trail with his Dachau story, and with the scenes of the protagonist sexually abusing women, but most parts of the story, and even these scenes for the most part, are told in a cold-blooded manner that does little to excite the reader, and as for all the many schemes of the main character, we always assume they will work like clockwork, and they do, so there is no suspense.

In "Death Ship" we saw Matheson present a science-fiction scenario and several more or less believable explanations for the scenario and then reject those explanations in favor of a supernatural explanation that was an homage to a centuries-old ghost story; "Death Ship" is perhaps a story about SF stories, an effort on Matheson's part to undermine the science focus of so many traditional SF stories, to argue that "science can't explain everything, you nerds" (the last paragraph of the story does actually include a sarcastic reference to "progress.")  Maybe you think that is clever and profound, and maybe you think that is lazy, that Matheson just stole the plot of the Flying Dutchman story and then prettied up his rewrite with some effective psychological scenes and science-fiction images.

Similarly, perhaps "The Distributor" is a comment on crime stories.  As he dismissed the speculative science elements of a traditional science fiction story in "Death Ship," maybe in "The Distributor" Matheson is dismissing the traditional core elements of the crime story--suspense and justice--to either point out how vacuous they are, or, out of sheer laziness so he can focus on the mechanical aspects of the crime story, coming up with complex crimes that would be difficult for people to escape or to solve.  (I am resisting the idea that the distributor is the Devil, which would be as lame as having the ship in "Death Ship" be The Flying Dutchman.) 

Alright, having drafted the above, let's consult two secondary sources and see why I am all wrong about "The Distributor."  A scan of My Favorite Horror Story is available at the internet archive, so I read F. Paul Wilson's one and a half page intro.  Unfortunately, this is mostly Wilson's literary autobiography; of "The Distributor" he just says it "blew him away" and he will never forget it.  I'm sure Matheson liked hearing that, but it doesn't help me any.

I own a copy of Matheson's Collected Stories: Volume Two (2005) and "The Distributor" is in there, so I read the author's afterword to the tale.  Matheson says he worked very hard on this one, and I can believe that--there are many characters and many moving parts and they all interact logically, even if they add up to very little emotionally.  Matheson suggests that the point of his story is the banality of evil, how evil is not necessarily loud and flashy but can sneak up on you, how evil is inexplicable; Matheson tells us he deliberately made the distributor's motivations and origin a mystery, that the villain in the story doesn't represent the Devil or anything like that.  Most interestingly, Matheson says he based the distributor on Brother Theodore, whom he knew, and that the actor described in detail to Matheson his ordeal in Dachau.  Before I moved to New York, I was a devoted fan of David Letterman and saw Brother Theodore multiple times on Late Night, and today I think of him for the first time in like 30 years.

**********

Earlier I made a big deal out of tallying a score for Shock! and now I am regretting it because I am having trouble scoring "Death Ship" and "The Distributor."  As I have been saying, I am unhappy with the ending of "Death Ship," but Matheson does a good job with the science fiction trappings and the psychological stuff, so I'll give "Death Ship" a plus.  "The Distributor" is the worse story--flat, monotonous, lacking in motivation, character, suspense and with a point that is mysterious or just annoying--but I can't say it is bad because it does seem very purposeful and it did force me to think about it, so I'll give it a neutral passing vote.  So, if Matheson came in with a +1 today, then suffered a loss with "The Creeping Terror" AKA "Touch of Grapefruit," but then earned a plus with "Death Ship," I guess we end up above water at +1 and can recommend Shock! as a collection.

Will we be reading Shock 3 someday?  (We've already got Shock 2 under our belts.)  It could happen!  But not this week.

(Maybe now I can stop singing "Shock the Monkey" to myself.)