"Crickets" (1960)
"Crickets" first hopped into view in the pages of Shock, a magazine that produced three issues. This is my chance to tell you I always find Jack Davis's work uninteresting and uninspiring. Davis' productions generate no emotion because they are so obviously a joke--the representations of monsters or gore elicit no fear or disgust, the depictions of men or women arouse no affection, admiration or desire, because every single Jack Davis image is like a caricature, a goof or a mockery that lacks a single shred of genuine feeling and puts distance between the viewer and the topic or theme presented, a distance that neuters any energy inherent in the subject so depicted. Davis' style perhaps makes sense for broad satire and juvenile jokes based on puns about current events, but is totally inappropriate for any kind of adventure or horror story, so I find him an odd choice to do the covers of Shock, if we assume the stories in the magazine are sincere efforts to thrill or unnerve readers.
Back to "Crickets." A couple are on vacation by a lake. They meet a fellow guest, a man who tells them that the crickets' songs are messages, something akin to Morse Code. This weirdo has cracked the code, and explains that the crickets are calling out the names of the dead, that the crickets are controlled by the dead. Why the dead find it worthwhile to transmit their names to the living in a form totally incomprehensible is not explained.
Anyway, this guy, the next day, accosts the couple again, saying that the crickets have started singing his name, and he is scared. The couple think he is a nut, but, of course, late at night they hear him scream and hurry to his room to find him dying, covered in hundreds of bloody cricket-bites. His last words are an indication that the crickets are now chirping out one letter at a time the names of the couple. Time to stock up on Deep Woods Off.
Like several of the stories in Shock II, "Crickets" is just an idea that is not deeply explored and does not make a lot of sense. It is not even internally consistent--are the dead broadcasting their own names or the names of those they are going to slay? Why would they do both? Why do they feel the need to kill the people who know what they are doing? The idea of cricket song as a means of communication is not bad, but it would work better in a sword and sorcery setting where a vampire or wizard was using the crickets to command his legions or something like that.
Acceptable filler. "Crickets" has appeared in a few anthologies including Michael Sissons' In the Dead of Night, where you can also find Ray Bradbury's famous "Small Assassin."
"Mute" (1962)
"Mute" starts with brief mysterious scenes of a German (uh oh) professor (uh oh again) arriving in small town America to look for some people, immigrants to the land of the free and the home of the brave who are involved in some kind of unspecified experiment.
The main body of the longish story begins with a remote house burning down, killing two of the people that professor is looking for, the parents of a seven-year-old boy; the boy survives. The boy's name is Paal, but he can't even say his own name--his parents refused to send him to school, he cannot say a single word nor understand a word of English or any other language. We readers learn that Paal is some kind of psyker who can read minds, but that this ability is jammed if people around him talk. His parents never spoke to him, but transmitted info and carried on conversations with him via telepathy--telepathy, Matheson suggests, is a rich and evocative method of communication, besides which mere words are dead husks, sterile and inert. (It is always remarkable to see a professional writer attacking language and the written word, his very stock in trade--we saw this with John Wyndham in Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids, you will recall.)
The sheriff of the small town decides Paal will stay with him and his wife until they figure out who should get custody of the boy. From the post office he acquires some letters sent to Paal's parents by correspondents of theirs in Europe; he writes out letters about the tragedy that has orphaned Paal to the return addresses on the envelopes, hoping to get in touch with Paal's relatives. But the sheriff's wife is already crazy about Paal and wants to keep him--you see, she and the sheriff lost their own son, who was drowned, and Paal is an attractive replacement! So, she intercepts the letters and destroys them.
They send Paal to school, which is a living hell for him, as all the chatter of the kids oppresses his brain, and the mind of the school teacher, a miserable old maiden lady whose status as a virgin Matheson reminds us of again and again, is a vision of horror for Paal. (The kind of people who administer the famous Bertholt test are going to want to throw "Mute" into the fire after those letters because the happiness of women in the story is totally reliant on their relationships with men.) The virgin teacher senses that Paal has some kind of psychic powers, because she herself has psychic powers, and considers them a terrible burden, and tries various--ruthless!--strategies to cripple Paal's psychic powers and turn him into a normal boy.
On the very day that German professor arrives at the sheriff's house, Paal's defenses crumble and he starts talking--his comprehension of and now participation in language puts an end to his telepathic powers. The German prof's project exploring the theory that humans are all naturally telepathic but this ability was short circuited by the invention of language is ruined. The professor admits to himself that perhaps this is for the best--Paal's birth parents didn't really love him, just thought of him as a particularly sympathetic guinea pig, while the sheriff's wife truly loves Paal and maybe love and human happiness are more important than expanding the reach of science.
Pretty good--the tale excites real human feeling and Matheson does a good job of trying to convey to the reader the experience of being a telepath and of being one or another type of unhappy woman. The characters, like the plot, exhibit a realistic moral ambiguity--they do things that are clearly wrong but which they think are justifiable because they serve what they consider (perhaps selfishly) to be higher goals, and we readers may be persuaded to agree. Thumbs up for "Mute."
Besides in numerous Matheson collections, "Mute" has been reprinted in a few anthologies, including a Twilight Zone anthology on which Matheson actually gets credit as one of three editors--it turns out "Mute" was turned into an episode of the TV show, one which I have totally forgotten.
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