Richard Matheson: "Trespass," "When Day is Dun," and "The Curious Child"

On February 9 we talked about three Richard Matheson stories that were reprinted in The Shores of Space, a 1957 collection which I own.  Let's check out three more stories from this book which is leaving a trail of glue fragments and dried paper shards all over my house.

"Trespass" (1953)

This story first appeared in Fantastic under the title "Mother by Protest" and was advertised on the magazine's cover as a "thriller" and promoted inside as "daring."  "Trespass" has reappeared in many anthologies as well as Matheson collections.

Scientist Collier returns home from a six month trip to the Latin American jungle to find his wife Ann pregnant!  There is no way he could be the father, but Ann insists she has not been unfaithful.  This causes a rift in their relationship and Matheson does a good job depicting how both man and wife react to this dreadful situation.  Ann's pregnancy proceeds, and again and again the Colliers and their doctor are faced with unconventional phenomena--Ann can't stop eating salt; Ann feels compelled to seek out the cold; Ann catches a serious illness and then is miraculously cured without medical intervention; and on and on.  Ann, never interested in serious reading before, speed reads all of her husband's science books and then devours huge stacks of books on science and philosophy she gets from the library.

Collier and his friends come to a startling conclusion--Ann has been impregnated by a Martian and the alien baby growing inside her is already fully conscious and feverishly gathering info on our world and culture to facilitate Martian conquest of this big blue marble we call home!  It even seems like the Martian can take over Ann's body and read the minds of those nearby, as is normal for aliens in these old SF stories.

Will Ann give birth to a hybrid monster?  Is Ann the only victim of this manner of diabolical alien intrusion?  Can the Colliers marriage be patched up?

This is a pretty good one, though maybe a little too long and maybe a little anticlimactic; I was expecting something more in the way of fireworks at the end.

As I have told you before, I own a copy of the second volume of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, and it turns out that all three of today's stories appear in this 2005 book.  In the brief commentary in that book after "Trespass" we learn that Matheson hated the title put on the story by the magazine staff, and that this story was made into a TV movie starring Barbara Eden called The Stranger Within.    

Left: John Schoenherr     Right: Frank Frazetta

"When Day is Dun" (1954)

Here's a short one that debuted in an issue of Fantastic Universe that also printed stories by Philip Jose Farmer, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, and Carl Jacobi, a phalanx of authors we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Maybe we'll have to explore this issue further in the future.   

Unfortunately, "When Day is Dun" is annoying filler--thumbs down.

After a nuclear war, a poet thinks he is the last man on Earth and sits among the ruins writing poems that commemorate the end of the human race.  Matheson includes lots of this poetry; I thought he had intentionally come up with bad poetry, as a joke, but Matheson's commentary on "When Day is Dun" in Collected Stories: Volume Two suggests Matheson worked hard on the poetry and liked some of it, so, go figure.  Even the regular text of "When Day in Dun" is full of poorly-conceived (IMHO) poetical flourishes as a reflection of the poet's thoughts.

It turns out that this versifier is not the last man on Earth--another survivor approaches him.  Our twist ending, which perhaps dramatizes the sort of selfishness and irrationality that might have caused the nuclear war, sees the poet, who wants to be the last living human being, shoot his fellow survivor dead.

This irritating trifle has not been anthologized.

 

"The Curious Child" (1954)

"The Curious Child" takes place in Midtown Manhattan, where I worked in an office for over a decade, a decade which, now that I live out in the country among cows and tractors and sheep and horses and the smell of manure, seems like an impossible dream, more like something I read about than a portion of my own real life.

Robert Graham leaves his office at 5:00 to wade into the rush hour crowds.  He can't find his car--he has forgotten where he parked it!  He searches for it, and realizes he doesn't even remember what color or make his car is!  Wait, does he even own a car?  Doesn't he live in Manhattan?  Or does he live in New Jersey, or one of the outer boroughs?  Graham tries to find his address in his wallet, but he loses his wallet, and eventually even forgets his name.

Matheson writes all this pretty effectively; Graham's panic and his interactions with hurrying New Yorkers in whose way he is getting ring true.  However, the story is too long, Matheson hitting us with the same gag again and again, this guy forgetting yet another thing.

I'm not sure if the twist ending is superfluous or not; I guess it depends on whether you want "The Curious Child" to be a true horror story in which a man suffers a terrible and inexplicable fate, or you want it to have a sort of hopeful sense-of-wonder science fiction ending that explains what is going on and ameliorates the horror angle.  Anyway, it turns out that Robert Graham was born in the high-tech future, the son of a scientist who was building a time machine.  Little baby RG blundered into the time machine and reappeared in 1919, where he was found and put into an orphanage and has lived a more or less successful 20th-century life, getting a good middle-class job and getting married.  Today, in 1954, he is 37 and his real people, the people of the future, have finally found him and are bringing him back to the future.  For some reason, their approach screwed up his memory ("...the closer we got to you the more your past and present was jumbled in your mind....")  In his afterword in Collected Stories: Volume Two, Matheson seems to realize the time travel resolution of the plot is not a clear improvement, and admits he "tacked on a science fiction ending" because he was sure the story wouldn't sell without such an ending.   

We'll call this acceptable.  "The Curious Child" has reappeared in a few British and European anthologies and various Matheson collections the world over.

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"When Day is Dun" is a clunker but it is quite short.  "Trespass" and "The Curious Child" are well-written and "Trespass"'s plot is actually pretty successful, so as a whole, on a page-per-page basis, this has been a reasonably good batch of Fifties SF. 

More SF from the the 1950s awaits us in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.