Richard Matheson

Extremely slow-paced previous book by Peter Straub still didn't cure me from my new passion for horror genre - once I have discovered that it keeps me awake trough the early hours of the night, now I can't get enough of it. So I decided to have "just a peek" at Richard Matheson whom I know as a man behind famous horror classic "I Am Legend"  that was brought to movie screen three times. 

First, out of curiosity, I poked around to find Matheson's famous early short story titled "Born of Man and Woman" that initially made him famous at the age of twenty four. It is strikingly memorable, poignant and unforgettable story told from the point of view of unnamed deformed child kept in chains by his parents - shocked and embarrassed by his unnatural looks (the full extent of his deformity is never completely described, just hinted at - which makes the reader's brain buzzing even more) the parents keep him away from everybody else in some sort of dark basement and the child knows only cold walls, hunger and beatings. He escapes every now and than just to look at the other children from the windows (he don't understand they are children, he sees them as  "little people like the little mother and little fathers" and it shows the heartbreaking isolation and loneliness of his life) after which he is usually brutally beaten. The relatively short story ends with anger rising in abused and badly beaten child who - not knowing anything else - might turn potentially dangerous towards his tormentors. Even at this early stage, Matheson shows such a brilliance and imagination - I actually couldn't sleep after I read that short story, it upset me so much that I wanted to jump into the story and save this child from the real monsters who are his parents. I still think about it, it left a deep impression on me.

You can read the complete story here

Seeing not one, but three film versions of "I Am Legend" kind of spoiled what could have been a wonderful literary discovery - knowing the story beforehand and seeing it all in various interpretations means that I couldn't help but going back to what I remember seeing in the movies. Rewinding the scenes in my mind and finding that, surprisingly, "The Last Man on Earth" with Vincent Price (that initially I didn't really like) is far more faithful to its literary original than Charlton Heston's "The Ωmega Man" (which I thought was super cool) - the way I see it now, latter is simply action vampire movie, while the former has true post-apocalyptic emptiness and loneliness that Matheson was writing about. It is haunting and powerful - but not in a really horror way, more like psychological isolation, loneliness and powerlessness in a world with no love, affections of company. When Robert Neville finally encounters the equally lonely stray dog, just to have him dying in his arms, it breaks your heart. This is the only sane living being that Neville had finally met in a long time and just as he almost tamed the little scared dog, it dies probably from the same germs that killed the rest of the planet.

"It was about eleven that night when Neville slowly undid the blanket folds and exposed the dog’s head.

For a few minutes it cringed away from his hand, snapping a little. But he kept talking to it quietly, and after a while his hand rested on the warm neck and he was moving his fingers gently, scratching and caressing.

He smiled down at the dog, his throat moving.

“You’ll be all better soon,” he whispered. “Real soon.”The dog looked up at him with its dulled, sick eyes and then its tongue faltered out and licked roughly and moistly across the palm of Neville’s hand. Something broke in Neville’s throat. He sat there silently while tears ran slowly down his cheeks.

In a week the dog was dead."

"Hell House" 

Perhaps I read this too soon after brilliant, multi-layered "The Haunting of Hill House" but unfortunately Matheson's "Hell House" did not have nearly same, seismic effect on me as Shirley Jackson's famous predecessor. Where Jackson weaved her story around ambiguous world of hallucination - all trough her novel, we are never told explicitly that there are ghosts in the house - Matheson is firm about it, we are supposed to take supernatural evil for granted and start from that premise. It is just a matter of time before characters start hearing things that go bump in the night and so on, eventually it turns into quite detailed, lurid prose that would probably appeal to my 14 years old self, but as it is, at this stage reading about sex deviations, crosses with penises and church orgies just feels like exaggerated case of vulgarity. It is a far cry from what I expected from Matheson of 1950s. Somewhere towards the end, I was also reminded of something that actually bothers me with the whole genre, the anticlimax that comes after author has been carefully building chilling atmosphere for so long - once we find and discover the origins of things that go bump in the night from than on it just feels pointless. To be honest, obviously nobody comes close to Shirley Jackson (with honorable exception of her follower Stephen King) so now after reading five horror novels in a row, I think it's a time to move on to something else.