Four stories by Richard Matheson from 1953

Joachim Boaz recently acquired a copy of Third From the Sun, a collection of 1950s stories by Richard Matheson, which brought Matheson to the forefront of my mind. Like everybody, I love I Am Legend, "Prey," and "Blood Son" (which also goes by the name "Drink My Blood."  Sneaky.) Since I started this blog I have not read very much Matheson, so I decided that the time had come to read some Matheson stories that were new to me.  While I, alas, do not own a copy of Third From the Sun with the sextastic cover that Joachim finds "horrid" (I respectfully beg to differ!) I do have my own stash of Matheson anthologies, and this week read four tales that first saw light in the year 1953.

"The Wedding" (1953)

A weak joke story about a groom who believes in dozens of silly superstitions, disrupting his wedding to a fat woman.  The punch line of the joke is that the truly dangerous superstition is the bride's--she insists the groom carry her over the threshold of their honeymoon hotel room, and he dies of a heart attack because she is so fat.

Hey, they can't all be as good as "Drink My Red Blood," (yet another of "Blood Son's" titles.)

"The Wedding" first appeared in Beyond Fantasy Fiction--dig that crazy cover!  I read it in my withdrawn library copy of Collected Stories Volume 2.

"Disappearing Act" (1953)

This is a solid psychological/existential horror story.  I guess you could call it a fantasy because what happens is nonsensical and there is no effort made to explain it. "Disappearing Act" originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; I read it in Tor's 2002 collection Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

The story is a journal, written by a failed writer with a failed marriage.  As I said about "Prey" way back when, Matheson is good at writing about the horror of our everyday lives--defeated ambitions, the agonizing search for love, that sort of thing-- and the first part of "Disappearing Act" is an effective look at the narrator's unhappy life.  And then we get into Twilight Zone territory when the people, and then the institutions, in the narrator's life begin to disappear without a trace.  The narrator begins to worry that he himself might disappear!  Matheson handles this fantastical material just as effectively.    

Quite good.

"Legion of Plotters" (1953)

This one first appeared in Detective Story Magazine.  Like "Disappearing Act" and "Wet Straw," I read it in my withdrawn library copy of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

"Legion of Plotters" is a well-written psychological tale with no supernatural or SF elements.  Mr. Jasper works retail in a Los Angeles department store and rides the bus between his apartment and work.  Jasper is hypersensitive, and the sounds, smells, and discourtesies of his fellow city-dwellers drive him to the edge, where he suspects people are conspiring to drive him insane, and then over the edge, to violence.

I liked it.

"Wet Straw" (1953)

"Wet Straw" was first published in Weird Tales.

John, a widower, is haunted at night while he lays in bed.  Each night the supernatural episodes, which start off with the smell of wet straw, grow more vivid and terrifying.  It turns out his wife is haunting him; one day years ago, on their honeymoon, they took cover in a barn during a rain storm, and agreed that they would always be together, even should one of them die.  The ghost of the wife has come to make good that promise, and reveals to us readers that John murdered her.

This one is just OK; somehow the writing is not as sharp and clear as in Matheson's best work, and the plot is a little more obvious and less innovative than "Legion of Plotters" and "Disappearing Act."  For example, I figured from the first page that John had killed his wife.  Also, there are scenes in which we are supposed to visualize how far from John's bed a window is.  At one point he has to stretch to barely reach the window, and then later the window is close enough that he punches his fist right through it.  When the doctor comes to look at John's hand, John lies and says he cut himself with a knife, but the doctor is skeptical because there is blood on John's sheets and blanket.  Doesn't the doctor see the broken glass?  Maybe I am nitpicking, but these kind of little discrepancies take me out of the story as I try to figure out what is going on  (maybe the window is in the ghost world and John didn't really break the window in our world?)

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I have to call "The Wedding" a miss, and "Wet Straw" just acceptable, but "Disappearing Act" and "Legion of Plotters" get the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

Unsafe as Houses: "Mad House" and "Slaughter House" by Richard Matheson

Like everybody, I love Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend and his short story "Drink My Blood," and Stephen Spielberg's brilliant TV movie, "Duel," for which Matheson wrote the screenplay.  My wife liked the book and film of What Dreams May Come, neither of which I have yet experienced.  Matheson is a good writer with a broad appeal who deserves his wide popularity and critical acclaim.

Today I read two Matheson stories which first appeared in magazines in 1953, "Mad House," in the Orb trade paperback edition of I Am Legend (1997), and "Slaughter House," in Volume 2 of Gauntlet Press's Richard Matheson: Collected Stories (2005).

"Mad House"

The style of this story, which appeared in Fantastic, is very good, immediate and powerful.  It is the story of Chris, a failed writer with a failed marriage, who teaches English at a small college whose students he hates.  Chris is prone to fits of rage, and we witness him become infuriated when he has problems with pencil leads breaking and typewriter keys jamming.  We learn that he has quite unfairly lashed out at his wife and his students; his behavior is in fact abusive, even villainous.

Matheson does a great job with all the realistic broken dreams, marital strife, crummy job stuff.  At the same time that we can't fail to deplore his abuse of others, it is easy to sympathize with Chris, who was so hopeful in his youth but lacks something (maybe focus, or drive, or talent) that was needed if he was to achieve his dreams.  I think we have all had at least an inkling of that in our lives, and we have all been irritated by little things like razors slipping and cabinets that are stuck and so forth.

The "fantastic" element of the story is that Chris's anger infects the house in which he lives, bringing the house and its furniture to evil life.  The aura of Chris's wife, who is a decent person, keeps the house somewhat balanced and peaceful, but, when she leaves Chris, the house and furniture attack and kill him.

In some ways this story is similar to Matheson's classic "Prey," in that it includes unhappy human relationships and then a fight between a person and an inanimate object or objects.  Maybe it is just me, but I found the supernatural part and the combat portions of "Prey" more convincing and exciting than those in "Mad House."  In "Prey" a doll in the shape of a warrior, made by some primitive tribe and filled with the spirit of some ruthless hunter, comes to life and fights a woman; in the end of the story the spirit of the hunter escapes the doll and enters the woman herself and we have every reason to believe the woman is now going to murder her mother and maybe other people.  In "Mad House" the spirit of the angry man enters furniture and he is killed in a gory fight against pencils, curtains, a bookshelf, etc.  I almost think "Mad House" could have worked better as a conventional story, without any, or maybe with much less, of the supernatural stuff, as well as less hand to hand combat with desks, dental floss, and all the rest.

"Mad House" is good, but pales beside the author's later "Prey."

"Slaughter House"

Two artistic brothers in their 20s buy and move into an old Victorian house full of Edwardian furniture which has no electricity, no TV, no radio.  Sounds like a paradise!  Is there an extra room for me, guys?

Our narrator is the older brother.  These brothers are very close, so close that when they were kids their schoolmates called them "the Siamese Twins."  The narrator talks about how his younger brother, Saul, is handsome, has beautiful eyes.  At one point Saul is sick and the narrator strokes his hair; it seems that they eat every meal together and enter each others' rooms without knocking.  Matheson really seems to be infusing the story with a homoerotic/incestuous subtext. 

All day Saul paints and the narrator writes, but then something goes wrong.  Saul is suddenly short with his brother, inattentive, starts looking a little unkempt and ill.  The narrator is heart broken that his brother doesn't seem to love him any more.

Matheson's horror stories are not just about monsters or supernatural creatures, but are about the real life fears ordinary people have.  (Robert Bloch suggests this is the key to Matheson's success in a blurb on the back of my edition of the Collected Stories: Volume 2.)  "Slaughter House" is about how a woman can interfere in the relationship between two male friends or, as in this case, brothers. This is a phenomenon with which I have personal experience; before we got involved with women, my brother and I, in our teens, would spend untold hours playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or computer games like "Doom," and "Telengard," hanging around listening to Led Zeppelin CDs or watching Hammer movies together.  Once women entered our lives, we almost never saw each other.  My brother even referred to this issue in his toast at my wedding (you can believe this did not go over well with my bride.)

It turns out that Saul is in love, or in lust, with the ghost of Clarissa Slaughter, an earlier inhabitant of the old house whose portrait the brothers have not moved from its prominent place.  Saul dances with the ghost woman, and, apparently, has sex with her.  When the narrator interrupts Saul's dancing, Saul assaults his brother.  Saul is wounded in the fight and sent to the hospital.  Clarissa then seduces the narrator.  Clarissa only appears at night, and the narrator begins to hate the day and sunlight.  Then Saul comes home, bitter with envy, setting the stage for a climactic battle between brothers and between the living and the dead!       

The more difficult vocabulary and more convoluted sentence structure of this one made me think Matheson was emulating H. P. Lovecraft, which would make sense since it appeared in Weird Tales.  Or maybe that Matheson was just trying to write in the style of the kind of guy who loves Victoriana and would want to live in a house with no electricity.  This edition includes notes from Matheson after each story, and in the note to this one Matheson indicates that he felt a desire to write a story in the "mid-Victorian style," and wrote "Slaughter House" the way he did in order to get that desire "out of his system."

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Two solid horror stories, worth the horror fan's time.
      

Richard Matheson's "Prey"

"Prey" by Richard Matheson is also included in American Fantasy Tradition, edited by Brian Thomsen.  

First appearing in 1969, and the source material for a famous film adaptation, "Prey" is a great horror story.  Matheson doesn't just write the scenes of violence and blood very convincingly- the scenes about human relationships, that demonstrate the horror we face in our everyday lives, trying to get along with the people we say we love and who say they love us, are equally convincing and chilling.

Classic.