Richard Matheson: "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"

Back in October, the internet archive was down (it was a tough time, people!) so I went to Wonder Book to buy a cheap copy of the A. E. van Vogt fix-up novel The War Against the Rull because I wanted to compare its text to that of an anthology version of one of the component stories, "The Gryb" AKA "Repetition."  While there, I also bought a copy of Avram Davidson's The Masters of the Maze.  It turned out that the store was having some kind of "buy 2 paperbacks and get a 3rd free" sale, so I grabbed a decaying copy of Richard Matheson's The Shores of Space, Bantam A1571.  (I didn't have time to hunt through the shelves for something with a good cover.)  In honor of my cheapness and of the man who wrote Vincent Price's best movie and Steven Spielberg's best movie, let's read three stories from this freebie.

But first!  Links to the two stories in The Shores of Space which I've already blogged about: "The Last Day," and "Pattern for Survival." 

"Being" (1954)

"Being" debuted in an issue of If with an awesome meteor shower cover; Matheson's story is graced with some pretty chilling Virgil Finlay illustrations.

"Being" is an effective horror story that exploits the tension between city and country folk, depicts two marriages, convincingly portrays people under terrible stress, and includes two very common science fiction elements; I quite enjoyed it.

It is August, and married couple Les and Marian, Los Angelenos, are driving cross country to New York to visit Marian's family.  Matheson does a good job describing their discomfort and frustration as they drive through the deserts of the South West--the intolerable heat, the need to get off the highway due to construction and follow poorly maintained dirt roads, the ever present risk of the car overheating.  There ain't no air-conditioned Toyota Corolla or GPS in 1954!  On some remote road the couple get kidnapped and held captive in a makeshift zoo owned by a gas station owner!

"Being" is more than hicksploitation.  Merv, widower, war veteran, and gas station owner, is a prisoner himself--a telepathic blob monster from outer space is making him capture people so it can eat them, one man every two days!  (We encounter many blob monsters and telepathic aliens here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  This is the first time Merv has ever captured a woman, and he is shaken to his core--he's already fed eight men to the blob monster but feeding it a woman feels like an even deeper level of degradation!  And Marian looks like his beloved wife Elsie!  

Matheson's descriptions of the psychology of our four characters as they struggle to survive in extraordinary circumstances, always trying to outwit or outfight each other, are compelling.  Merv and Les in particular are forced to balance the need to survive with their ideas of justice and duty.  All the characters act believably and it is easy to sympathize with any or all of them.

A quite good science fiction horror tale.  "Being" has been reprinted in a bunch of anthologies and Matheson collections, including another I own, Collected Stories Volume 2, where Matheson in an afterword talks about the genesis of the story and his efforts to turn it into a screenplay.

"The Test" (1954)

"The Test" first saw print in an issue of F&SF alongside Chad Oliver's "Transformer," a story I panned when I read it a few years ago, and an Edmond Hamilton story I have yet to read.  There is always new territory to explore!

It is the year 2003.  A law has been passed--old people, I guess 65 and older, have to take a comprehensive physical, mental, and psychological test every five years and those who fail are euthanized!  Our characters are a married couple with two kids and the husband's father, age 80.  The story dwells on ambiguity and ambivalence--the justification for the law is overpopulation and the way it strains resources, but of course there is reason to believe it was passed because many people are sick of having their elderly parents around.  The emotions of the married couple in the story are torn--the old man is a burden, a hassle, but at the same time his son still loves him.

This is only barely a SF story--for the most part it is a mainstream literary story about the relationships between adult children and their parents in our prosperous individualistic age in which family ties are weaker and people live longer, in which people want more and more freedom and (paradoxically) give the government more and more power in hopes of securing that freedom--generally at the expense of the freedom of others.  Matheson handles the material ably, and employs an economical style--every phrase and image is powerful, the story is just the right length and moves at just the right speed.  Thumbs up!      

This is another widely reprinted story.  "The Test" appears under the heading "Overpopulation" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts, and in his afterword to the story in Collected Stories Volume 2, Matheson talks about F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's reaction to the story and tells us there was some interest in Italy in adapting the story for the screen, but Matheson doesn't know if anything came of it.

           

"Clothes Make the Man" (1951)

"Clothes Make the Man" debuted in the final issue of Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.  This is a silly filler story.

An ad exec guy is a real clotheshorse.  He has all his clothes custom tailored, even his undies.  He never takes off his hat, even inside, and however hot it is, he won't take off his jacket.  On a picnic his wife, brother, and sister-in-law take off their shoes and socks to wade in a stream, but he refuses.  

Anyway, it becomes apparent that the man can't function without his clothes.  If someone swipes his hat as a joke this wizard who is always coming up with spellbinding ad campaigns becomes an imbecile.  If he doesn't have shoes on he can barely walk.  The climax to the story is that the clothes come to life and start walking around without him, even doing work at the office and dating women; bereft of his clothes, the ad exec is a useless wreck, unable to even talk, in the hospital in steep decline. 

We also get a twist ending.  "Clothes Make the Man" is a first-person narrative; the narrator is at a party and the story of the clotheshorse is being told to him by the clotheshorse's heart-broken brother.  The narrator is very dismissive towards this poor bastard.  The twist ending is that the narrator is the suit of clothes, out on a date with the clotheshorse's wife.

The plot does not make any sense, but the story moves at a quick pace and all the individual sentences and paragraphs are OK--we'll call "Clothes Make the Man" barely acceptable.

I don't think this one has been anthologized in English, but "Clothes Make the Man" has been included in European anthologies, as well as a stack of Matheson collections in many languages.

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Matheson has a high reputation and "Being" and "The Test" demonstrate why--Matheson's characters feel very real, making his SF ideas all the more engaging.  As for "Clothes Make the Man," well, they can't all be winners, and we have read much worse.

More short stories in our next exciting episode, but from over twenty years later.