Richard Matheson's Shock II: Part One

On Richard Matheson's isfdb page we see listed a series consisting of four collections, each with "shock" in its title.  On a recent visit to our nation's capital, I purchased a copy of the second volume of the Shock series, Shock II, Dell 7829, at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.  Shock II offers "Thirteen Tales to Haunt the Imagination" originally published in the period 1952-62 and we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are going to cover them all, in the order they appear in the book, over the course of three blog posts.  Episode one of this journey will bring us to page 71 of the 192 page paperback; we'll be reading four pieces, and skipping one, "No Such Thing as a Vampire," which we blogged about back in 2020 when I read a selection of stories from Martin H. Greenberg's 1997 anthology Vampires: The Greatest Stories.

"A Flourish of Strumpets" (1956)

As the title of the story perhaps suggested to you, "A Flourish of Strumpets" first appeared in the pages of Playboy, our most pretentious skin rag!  You can find it in a bunch of Matheson collections and a 1990s anthology of fiction from Playboy.

This is a gimmicky filler story.  Prostitutes start coming to the doors of suburban homes in the evening, offering their wares like door-to-door salesmen.  They are "representatives" of a big concern called "the Exchange."  Our protagonist and his wife are mortified, disgusted, enraged, and call the police.  When the police do nothing, they call the FBI.  The Feds don't do anything either.  Meanwhile, our hero's colleagues at work don't see anything wrong with this new firm and its innovative business model.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, and many of the jokes revolve around the euphemisms Matheson comes up with to both describe women's breasts ("She absorbed blouse-enhancing air") and the main character's sexual excitement each night as he answers the door to find a different beautiful woman offering to have sex with him ("...birds with heated wings buffeted at his face.")  These metaphors are pretty bad.

The point of the story, I guess, is that every man is corruptible, will cheat on his wife if he can figure out a way to do it.  Maybe a leftist would interpret the story as being about how advertisers can create demand for products people don't actually want if they just keep banging away at potential customers day after day, and how the government can easily be persuaded by business interests to give them free rein.  Anyway, Matheson somewhat obliquely indicates that the main character has succumbed and started seeing the Exchange's whores without his wife knowing.  Tempting women no longer ring the door bell each evening.  The twist ending is that now that the Exchange has won the protagonist as a client, they start sending attractive men over to try to badger his wife into becoming a customer of the services they offer women.

Acceptable, I guess.

"Brother to the Machine" (1952)

This baby debuted in If, and then was reprinted in 1965's Invasion of the Robots, one of those anthologies credited to Roger Elwood but in fact put together by Sam Moskowitz, as well as a bunch of Matheson collections.

It is the war-torn totalitarian future!  Our main character is in something of a daze, wandering the streets, and we see that there are security cameras on every corner, police aircraft patrolling overhead, newspaper headlines reporting on inflation and newspaper editorials expressing support for the extermination of the Martians, and in  shop windows Venusian slaves for sale.  Everybody on the street, human or robot, is working, as the government forces every able-bodied person to have a job, but our hero is not working--he has fled his job developing super weapons.  He tries to commit suicide, but this is illegal and the cops spot him and take up pursuit.  He flees to a park, tries to kill himself by jumping in a pool.  Our twist ending is that he is a robot.

Acceptable, I suppose.

"Descent" (1954)

Another story from If, and our second fun astronaut in outer space cover of the day, but a literal one, whereas, I think, the earlier one is somehow symbolic or represents an illusion.    

I am pretty sure I've read "Descent" before, in that period before the mold spores burst and this blog propagated across the interwebs; as I have mentioned before I own a withdrawn library copy of the Matheson collection Collected Stories: Volume 2 and "Descent" appears there so that is probably where I read it.

Our six or seven characters live out in California.  Tomorrow there will be a nuclear war, a war which has been long scheduled, so everybody has had time to prepare.  The government has set up vast underground shelters, entire underground cities, that will house the population.  This story follows our characters as they look at the sunset and sadly reflect they will never see one again, play their records for the last time, lament they can't bring more books underground with them, grapple with the decision of whether to die like men on the surface or live like worms underground, and so on.

OK.  It looks like this one has never been anthologized.

"Deadline" (1959)

"Deadline" was first published in an issue of Rogue bearing a more artistically sophisticated cover than you usually see on these softcore porno magazines, and has been anthologized numerous times.

Our protagonist is a doctor whose wife is pregnant.  During a New Year's party he is called away to tend to an old geezer who is confident he is about to die, even though his land lady says he was up and about earlier in the day as if nothing was wrong.

Old geez tells a wild story.  He was born exactly one year ago and has been aging two years every week.  He says that every year somebody is born at midnight as the year turns and lives out that year and dies precisely as the year ends--this is the source of the conventional idea of the new year being represented as a baby and the passing year as an old dude with a scythe.

Sure enough, the guy expires at midnight.  When the doc gets back home he learns that his wife gave birth at exactly midnight.  Dun dun DUN....

I think I have to give this story a thumbs down, as its central gimmick is too dumb.  

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I think of myself as a guy who likes Matheson--I like "Prey" and "Blood Son" and I Am Legend, and of course I like the movies Duel (1971) and The Last Man on Earth (1964).  But these stories here are not so great.  Each one is built around a gimmicky idea that may or may not make any sense, and serves merely to present the idea competently--the stories lack the singular writing style or any human feeling, personality, or atmosphere that might make them truly entertaining or compelling.  Each story lives or dies based on its gimmick; most of them live, but not one of them thrives.

"A Flourish of Strumpets" is the best of the four stories under discussion as its gimmick at least seems plausible and it offers some kind of (cynical) point of view and is trying to say something about society and human nature; it also tries to make you laugh with its weak jokes.  "Brother to the Machine" also has a plausible foundation and a sort of misanthropic point of view, but is less novel (there are plenty of "humans are evil imperialists" and "holy crap, he's a robot!" stories out there) and less engaging.  The idea behind "Descent" doesn't make much rational sense (the attack that is going to devastate the United States is on a public schedule?) but it at least makes symbolic or abstract sense as an effort to represent rational fears of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union (not that the USSR is named in the story--these old SF stories that depict nuclear war often don't identify the enemy, I guess because so many members of the SF community were communist sympathizers who thought the USSR better than, or no worse than, the United States and would object to any depiction of Soviet misbehavior.)  "Deadline," though editors liked it, is the worst of the lot as its gimmick is stupid and it has absolutely nothing to say about life or the government or anything at all.

Wow, disappointing.  Let's hope there are some legitimately good stories in the next batch of tales from Shock II.