By the Gun

Though best known as a grandmaster of horror, Matheson is also a noted writer of westerns ( The Gunfight ) . This volume reprints four of his early sagebrush yarns--two short stories and two novellas--and presents two original stories. Matheson's trademarks are in evidence: the senseless but seemingly inevitable violence and brutality, the quickness and finality of death, a melancholy feeling of hopelessness, taut plotting and convincing dialogue. The best entry is the opening novella, ``Gunsight,'' in which an aging lawman hides his growing blindness with the help of a local doctor. It's only in this work, the collection's oldest, that Matheson allows a hopeful, if ambiguous, ending, in which the hero is allowed to triumph and survive. Elsewhere, spirals of violence spin toward all-too-logical conclusions. In ``Go West, Young Man'' a kid from the East comes to the frontier to pursue a bloody dream, only to have his new life end before it's begun. ``Boy in the Rocks'' deals with a range war that needn't have occurred, while one of the new pieces, ``Of Death and Thirty Minutes,'' laconically tells of a hostage situation with eerily modern overtones. Some of the early work reflects an author still polishing his craft, with genre cliches and hackneyed phrases marring the the prose and plotting. (May)