Richard Matheson: "Little Girl Lost," "The Doll That Does Everything" and "The Funeral"

Let's read three more stories from the Richard Matheson collection titled The Shores of Space.  We've already read a bunch of them--check out these links if you are so inclined:  "Trespass," "When Day is Dun," and "The Curious Child"; "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"; "The Last Day"; "Pattern for Survival."  I'm not going to blog about the most famous stories in The Shores of Space, "Blood Son" and "Steel," because I've already read the former (I recommend it) and I already know the story of the latter from seeing a TV version of it and hearing talk of a cinematic version.  I own a 1957 paperback copy of The Shores of Space, but as you can see at one of the posts linked above, it is falling apart and it is a hassle dealing with it so today I am reading a scan of a 1969 Bantam printing.

"Little Girl Lost" (1953)

This story debuted in an issue of Amazing that has one of the least attractive covers I have ever seen on a big name SF magazine.  "Little Girl Lost" has also been filmed for television, isfdb is telling me, but maybe I won't remember it.

OK, I remember it, but it is short and pretty good, so it wasn't annoying to experience the text version of "Little Girl Lost."  Told in the first person, from the perspective of the father, the story is about how a little girl falls through a temporary portal into another dimension and her parents are frantic trying to find her--they can hear her calling for help, but cannot see her.  We get some incomprehensible jazz about how a one-dimensional world is a line and a two-dimensional world is an infinite number of lines and a three-dimensional world is an infinite number of planes and so on, but mostly the story is about the emotions of the parents and Matheson does a good job with that so thumbs up.  A dog is the hero of the story, all you canine lovers should take note.  The plot is resolved by luck more than initiative or logic or strength or whatever, but that adds to the fear element, so is actually a benefit more than a detriment to how well "Little Girl Lost" operates as a horror story.

"Little Girl Lost," an above average piece of work, has been reprinted many times. 

"The Doll That Does Everything" (1954)

Here we have a lame joke story, overwritten and perhaps offensive.

A married couple consists of a male poet and a female sculptor; neither is very successful financially.  Their toddler keeps destroying their work, and the rest of the house besides. The poet talks about killing his son, using some rarely seen words (this is part of the overwriting) and repeating himself (yeah, more overwriting) for comic effect.

The parents have the idea that a companion for the kid will keep him under control. They purchase a robot child which will grow at the normal human rate, maturing alongside their real child.  But instead of pacifying their little hellion, the robot makes things worse, as junior figures out how to get the robot to help it in its destructive pursuits. So the parents murder their son and raise the robot in its place, a ruse which succeeds for many years.

Thumbs down.

After debuting in Fantastic Universe, "The Doll That Does Everything" would go on to be reprinted in an anthology edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia with one of the worst covers I have ever seen on an SF book.  In an afterword to "The Doll That Does Everything" in its appearance in 2005's Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Volume Two, Matheson talks a little about his relationship with Charles Beaumont and how it influenced this story.   

"The Funeral" (1955)

Here's another Matheson story adapted for use on the boob tube, but I am confident I don't know this one because I don't think I've ever seen Night Gallery.

The name "Beaumont" appears casually in the first line of "The Funeral," making me think this must be a joke story, and my suspicions are confirmed when I find "The Funeral," like "The Doll That Does Everything," to be overwritten, presumably for comedic effect. Try this sentence on for size:

His cardiac muscle flexing vigorously, he forced back folds of sorrowful solicitude across his face.

Ouch!

The foundational joke of the story is that a vampire comes to a funeral home, wanting a funeral for himself. The funeral director is scared and even faints during the service, which is attended by a witch, a werewolf, a hunchback named Ygor, etc., and which devolves into a brawl in which the various monsters use their supernatural powers on each other. The monsters wreck the place, but pay for all repairs, so the funeral home makes a tidy profit.  In the final scene a Lovecraftian entity, shapeless and tentacled, arrives at the funeral home, the establishment having been recommended to him by the vampire.

I hate this kind of thing (I never cared for The Addams Family, for example, though I love The Munsters because I like the actors and the plots are traditional sitcom things just in horror drag) so thumbs down.  Waste of time.

"The Funeral" first appeared in F&SF and has reappeared in numerous Matheson collections (I own it in two different books) and a small number of foreign-language anthologies.  Matheson's afterword to the story in Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Volume Two is about Matheson's work on Night Gallery and Star Trek; it seems that Matheson came up with lots of scripts for these shows that were rejected.  For even the best of us, life is a series of defeats.

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I guess people love joke stories--"The Funeral" is in the Penguin Classics The Best of Richard Matheson.  I rarely like joke stories myself, so today was not a good day for the blog.  I look to fiction for sincerity, and I found it in "Little Girl Lost," easily the best story we read today.

More short horror-themed stories await us in the next thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--show up if you are confident your cardiac muscle can take it!