Book Review: "The Best of Richard Matheson"

The Best of Richard Matheson (2017)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)
Introduction by Victor LaValle
407 pages

Déjà vu all over again.

That’s the surprising experience awaiting most anyone who reads through the 33 stories collected in The Best of Richard Matheson. Even though many will perhaps not recognize Matheson’s name, they will discover sprinkled throughout this engaging collection of horror, fantasy, mystery and science fiction stories, plots that seem strikingly familiar.

I certainly came to these stories unfamiliar with Matheson’s work. Though Victor LaValle’s delightfully crafted introduction tips readers off, I was unprepared for the number of stories that I suddenly recognized as classic TV episodes or movies.

So it was for Duel, which opens with a driver heading to San Francisco who uneventfully passing a tractor-trailer on an isolated, two-lane highway in a region of dry scrub and mountains. A few miles later, having “drifted into a reverie” on the empty road, the driver “started as the truck roared past him on the left, causing his car to shudder slightly,” and, after cutting in, forced him “to brake to maintain a safe distance behind it.” The duel has begun, as made famous in the eponymous Hitchcock movie. It turns out that Matheson not only provided the inspiration for the movie with his story, but also wrote the screenplay.

Several of the stories included in the collection also became the basis for Twilight Zone episodes. Perhaps the most famous of these, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, starred William Shatner as a man not completely comfortable with flying who becomes convinced during a flight on a stormy night that a kind of ape-man is jumping onto the wing and trying to remove a cover plate of the engine. Can he, however, convince the airplane’s crew of the imminent danger?

Matheson does brilliant job of building up of the tension in the stories of this collection. Each tends to open with the main character or characters in the midst of an unremarkable activity or moment, one that then gradually – ever so deliberately – spirals out of their ability to control or even comprehend. Quotidian lives that most any reader can identify with become suddenly transformed into dogged battles for survival against a seemingly relentless force.

If you’re the least bit skittish about the unexplained, Matheson’s tightly crafted tales will have you glancing over your shoulder at unexpected sounds or glints of light that before would have passed unnoticed. For, unlike the more famous movie and TV versions, these stories play out in our imagination, a fertile if mysterious ground in which they can link into our profoundest personal fears.

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