Richard Matheson's Shock II: Part Two

I wouldn't say I was thrilled with the four stories from Shock II that we read last time we convened, but let's read four more pieces from the  a 1964 collection of Richard Matheson tales that our British friends may know as Shock 2 and see how they strike us.  After all, the back cover promises that the book contains "some of the most extraordinary excursions into the realm of the unknown ever thought or written;" maybe they put that good stuff in the middle of the book, you know, like a rich creamy filling. 

"The Man Who Made the World" (1954)

This short little piece looks like the dialogue from a play, six pages of "DOCTOR J: How old are you?" and "SMITH: Forty-seven."  There are also parenthetical stage directions in italics: "(He sits.)"  Can't you just see it?  

A short dude comes to the office of Doctor Janishefsky.  Dude, who is named Smith, claims he made the world five years ago, filling the brains of his creations--us--with false memories of the past, filling the world with minerals and fossils and books that support the illusion that the universe is very old, etc.  Smith is worried that if he dies the world will end.  The doctor scoffs and when Smith leaves the office he is hit by a motor vehicle and killed.  The world vanishes, except for the doctor and Smith, who, I guess, are God and his son or gods or aliens or something.

Bad gimmicky filler.  This rotten egg was first laid in an issue of Imagination with a sparkling cover and has been reprinted in numerous Matheson collections, including 2005's Collected Stories: Volume 2, which I own.  I dug out my copy of Collected Stories: Volume 2 and found that in an afterword to the story Matheson admits "The Man Who Made the World" is no good, calling it "almost a non-story" and like "something that a fifteen-year-old would write" and that it probably wouldn't have been published if Matheson wasn't already a name writer.

"Graveyard Shift" (1960)

"Graveyard Shift" made its debut in the very first issue of Ed McBain's Mystery Book, a magazine that endured for three issues.  There it is titled "The Faces."  A very helpful 2010 blogpost at the BareBones E-Zine strongly suggests that the story was probably retitled "Graveyard Shift" in error, and that Matheson prefers the title "Day of Reckoning."      

This is an effective, disturbing story, with personality, a well-structured plot, striking and horrible images, real human feeling and actual characters.  Thumbs up!

"Graveyard Shift" is told in three letters.  First, a letter from a guy who went into a remote house to deliver an official government notice to a reclusive woman.  He finds the woman dead--murdered!--and her child totally insane, so disturbed he cannot eat, vomiting up food forced upon him!  The guy decides he can't leave the insane kid so he sends this message by sticking it in a dog's collar!

Letter number two was penned by a second man and is addressed to the brother of the murder victim.  This epistle describes the kid's extraordinary behavior, and provides clues as to what drove the tyke mad.  It seems his mother went to the trouble of studying psychology in order to learn how to make her own son a basket case who could barely function, whose health is compromised by an inability to nourish himself.  One of her diabolical methods was to paint a multitude of menacing faces in glow-in-the-dark paint on the walls and ceiling of the kid's room.  

The final letter is from the brother of the murder victim, explaining why a woman might commit such an atrocity--she was pathologically jealous and hated her own son because he took drew her husband's attention away from her.  After her husband died saving the kid from drowning, she went to live away from society with him so she could wreak a horrendous revenge on their innocent offspring!

This story is far and away the best in the book thus far.  Marvin Kaye included the tale under this lame title in an anthology, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, and it has also been reprinted in Matheson collections under the more appropriate title "Day of Reckoning." 

"The Likeness of Julie" (1962)     

(Remember Just Say Julie?  That was really something, wasn't it?)

I read and blogged about this one back in 2019 when we looked at an anthology of "provocative horror."  This is actually a decent story--maybe they really did put the good ones in the middle!

Left: Back of my copy   Right: Cover of a Mexican edition 

"Lazarus II" (1953)

In preparation for reading "Lazarus II," I read the King James versions of chapter 16 of Luke and chapter 11 of John so I would be up to speed on people named Lazarus in the Bible and their stories of death and resurrection.
  
As the Matheson's story begins, a man wakes up in a robot body.  We learn that he is a 28-year-old who committed suicide by slashing his wrists, and who can blame him--he was a sociology professor and couldn't face another semester!  As he rails against his father, the scientist who has brought him back to life in a mechanical body, we learn the root causes of his act of self-murder--the domineering and smothering mother who kept him from moving to New York to become a writer and from marrying the woman he loved.  Mom badgered and nagged Dad into bringing the reluctant sociologist back to life, but by the end of the story it looks like Dad is finally going to rebel against Mom.  (Better late than never?)

"Lazarus II" raises the question of to what extent you are your mind and to what extent you are your body--if your brain or personality was put into a different body--or a machine!--how much would having different physical characteristics change your character?  (Jack Vance also talked about this in that story we recently read, "Chateau d'if" AKA "New Bodies for Old.")  Matheson in an icky way connects this to another theme of the story, the hints that Mom is sexually attracted to her son--she demanded that her son be brought back to life because she thought she loved him, but finds that now that he doesn't have his handsome body, but instead looks like a tin can with claws, that she doesn't love him anymore.  

Two of my favorite themes--brain/soul transplants and the disastrous sexual relationship--in a story that exhibits real human drama and offers characters that feel absolutely real (tyrannical wife, browbeaten husband and kid who wants to live in New York)--thumbs up!  This story and "Graveyard Shift" AKA "Day of Reckoning" make you think the bad mother is a recurring theme in Matheson's best work, and I am here for it! 

"Lazarus II" first shuddered to disturbing life in an issue of Fantastic Story that I am having trouble finding at the internet archive, which is too bad, because this issue has illustrations by Virgil Finlay that I don't know that I have seen before.  The story has of course been reprinted in multiple Matheson collections; in addition, Peter Haining selected it for his anthology The Monster Makers. 

"Big Surprise" (1959)

We just recently read a 1931 story by science fiction Grandmaster Jack Williamson that inspired a Wonder Stories reader contest, and "Big Surprise," when it debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as "What Was In the Box?" was the occasion of a similar contest.  But whereas Wonder Stories printed the letters of winning readers, according to the aforementioned Bare Bonez E-Zine blog post, the winners of this 1959 contest were never recognized in the pages of EQMM.  For shame!

This story is well-written and I liked it all the way to the end, but the end is both too obvious and too nonsensical to satisfy.  

An old man, for years, has leaned on his fence and beckoned to the local boys as they walk by on their way home from school.  Most kids avoid this creepy freak, but every so often a boy will talk to him, and so everybody in town knows that the old man's MO is to ask the kids if they want a surprise, and tell them that the surprise is buried and must be dug up.  But over all these years no kid has actually dug for the surprise.

This story is about a kid who has the perseverance to actually follow the old man's directions to go to such and such a place and then face such and such a direction and walk so many paces and then dig ten feet down to find the surprise.  After he gets ten feet down he finds a big box, and opens it--the old man sits up and says "Surprise!"  (It seems that the original story did not reveal the box's contents and readers with a hankering for 25 smackers were to suggest what was in there.  Matheson added the ending when the story appeared in book form.) 

I guess the old man is a vampire who uses his vampire powers to get to his coffin that is buried under ten feet of earth.  But since this story originally appeared in a magazine that, I thought, didn't include the supernatural, maybe we are supposed to think this old weirdo has dug a tunnel to the box.  Does he hang around there all the time?  Or does he just watch to see if kids are digging (something no kids have done for years) and then crawl into the box when he does?  This doesn't make a lot of sense, especially when we recall that the kid opened the box by knocking off a latch with his shovel--if the old freak isn't a vampire, isn't he running the risk of getting his head bashed in?

Acceptable.  People seem to like "Big Surprise;" it has appeared in a number of anthologies and was even turned into an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery.    

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Well, two of these stories are legitimately good, so we have some good news and can hope we'll get some good stories when we finish up Shock II in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.