It's five minutes before our interview with Richard Matheson and we're staring apprehensively at the telephone. Our concern has nothing to do with Matheson, who has generously put his Friday afternoon on hold to accommodate our bicoastal time difference.
It's the phone.
In the world of Matheson's fiction, telephones and other household objects are usually more than they appear. Sometimes they're portals to dimensions dark and dangerous to the person who takes their ubiquity for granted. In his short story "Long Distance Call," which he translated into a memorable episode of the original Twilight Zone television series, a telephone just like ours makes an eerie and unexpected connection with the afterlife. Where did Matheson get that idea—and are we about to find out?
To our relief, the voice on the other end sounds nothing like what we might have expected from the writer who ended that tale with a voice from beyond the grave telling a helplessly bedridden listener that he was coming right over. It is gentle and inflected with a sort of bemusement that suggests the speaker is a bit surprised at all the fuss made about him. The modest tone jibes with the publicity photos of a tall, trim man with a halo of white hair wreathing a broad forehead and a snowy beard to match. Matheson looks like he could be someone's father, or even a grandfather (he's both). Dare we say that he sounds perfectly ordinary?
But then ordinary is the key to Matheson's extraordinary career. Half a century ago his simple stories about ordinary people whose lives are thrown off kilter when the everyday world turns unexpectedly menacing made a splash with fantasy readers. In 1959, when Rod Serling began casting about for writers for The Twilight Zone, Matheson was tapped because his sensibility about the human condition and its dark side meshed perfectly with Serling's vision for the program. When The Twilight Zone became a cultural phenomenon, images from the 14 episodes Matheson scripted joined our modern cultural vocabulary. For every person who recognizes Matheson's name on a book, there are scores more who know him through the stories he adapted or wrote for the screen. Is there anyone not familiar with his fear-of-flying TZ classic "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which an air traveler teeters on the brink of a nervous breakdown trying to convince the crew of his flight that a monster on the wing is dismantling the engines?
The influence of Matheson's writing is not measured in multimillion-dollar book contracts and seven-figure print runs but by the impact it has had on a generation of writers who grew up reading it in books and magazines or absorbing it from the tube. Countless contemporary horror, fantasy and science fiction professionals credit him with teaching them the importance of characters and settings that the average reader can relate to. His best student learned very well. Stephen King, who acknowledges Matheson as the greatest influence on his own writing, has praised him repeatedly for relocating horror from the Gothic castle to the modern suburb. In the introduction to a recent collection of Matheson tales he states, "without Richard Matheson I wouldn't be around."
Much of Matheson's fiction is still around as well, in print up to half a century after first publication. "That's real storytelling," says Don Congdon, Matheson's literary agent since 1956. "He's such a good writer and has been for a long time. He kind of figured out things out on his own. He's one of those writers who has a feeling for the type of story he writes and understands what he wants to do in it. In my judgment those are the people who stay."
Sidestepping Genres
In the 1950s and '60s, Matheson unnerved a lot of people by showing them a subtle thread of the unexpected running through the common fabric of American life. Chatting with him, PW discovers that he still has a few surprises up his sleeve, not least his busy publishing schedule. Matheson, who's 76, is enjoying one of his most productive years ever. In January, Tor released Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, a retrospective featuring some of his best short fiction. Abu and the Seven Marvels, his first book for young readers, and A Primer of Reality, a nonfiction book that grew out of his life-long fascination with metaphysics, have just been published by Gauntlet Press. Off Beat, a compilation of hitherto uncollected short stories, is coming from Subterranean Press, whose publisher, William Schafer, cites exposure to Matheson's work as one reason for his involvement in fantastic fiction. "Matheson was very good at explicating common fears and giving them a shape and substance that contemporary realistic fiction couldn't. He's one of those writers who helped bring a seriousness to science fiction and horror that, at least in terms of popular fiction, I don't know was there before."
This month will see Tor's publication of Hunted Past Reason, his first new novel in seven years. On the surface, it's a deceptively simple suspense story about a two-man backpacking trip that turns into a nightmare when one man goes berserk and decides to hunt his companion to the death. But the two men—a rising Hollywood writer and an unraveling actor—are products of diametrically opposed philosophies of life, and the novel's tripwire tension builds as much from uncertainty about which ideology will prevail as from the rivals' Darwinian struggle to survive.
With its minimalist cast, rendering of the everyday gone rancid, and depiction of a man struggling against overwhelming odds to survive, the novel is vintage Matheson. "I've been into metaphysics for some years," he tells us, "and one of the beliefs I came to is embodied in the quote at the beginning of the book: 'To die is nothing—to live is everything.' I thought for many years how interesting it would be if you had somebody threatening to chase and kill you, and you said, 'Okay, go ahead and kill me, I'm not afraid to die.' And I developed it from there."
Ultimately, says Matheson, the protagonists of his stories are him. His identification with his characters and their inner landscapes explains why he takes exception to the title of Hunted Past Reason, which was not his choice. "I told them I didn't like it. 'Hunted past reason' is a line from King Lear, but it doesn't mean a thing. My title was To Live, which is the whole point of the book." The candid criticism indicates a man dismayed when the order of his world is undermined. It's a real-life Mathesonian moment, and it's not the last one of our interview. Matheson, we learn, also has problems with some comments in the PW review of the new book. "The reviewer referred to me as 'the Hemingway of Horror.' I read it and thought, 'Oh my God, here we go again!' I'd rather be the Faulkner of Fear, or the Steinbeck of Scariness. I characterize myself as a storyteller in various fields. Fantasy has always been a favorite area of mine, but not horror. "
This is a surprising admission from a writer whose books—and the films made from them—many consider to be among the seminal works of horror of the past half century. Matheson's third novel, I Am Legend, is a landmark of vampire fiction whose one-man-against-a-world-of-supernatural-monsters scenario inspired George Romero's cult favorite Night of the Living Dead. The Shrinking Man, his parable of a man's alienation and estrangement from his once familiar world, features a battle between its diminutive protagonist and a common cellar spider that ranks as one of the century's classic scenes of primal horror. His short story "Duel," made into a memorable television movie that launched the career of neophyte director Steven Spielberg, spun an incident of road rage into a dark fantasia on the inescapable terror of a cruelly mechanistic universe.
The list goes on—yet Matheson's disaffection with the "horror writer" tag is understandable, given that little of what he has written in the past two decades has featured horror or the supernatural. "Richard is best known for horror and suspense," says Greg Cox, his editor at Tor, "but we've found that there's also a sizable readership for his more romantic books, such as Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come, and even his forays into other genres, such as The Beardless Warriors, a novel of World War II. His books, of whatever genre, tend to get shelved together in the mainstream section of bookstores, which is probably where he belongs."
Indeed, Matheson's reluctance is just a symptom of a larger disdain he expresses for genre labels in general. "All writers, except for the ones that are really aesthetic, get categorized and put in a cubbyhole," he says. "I gave a speech once at the Writers Guild meeting, where I attacked genres. I made the point that if you write a love story, and it takes place out in the old west, they call it a western. If you set a love story on Mars, it becomes science fiction." Listening to Matheson speak about being a prisoner of genre categories, it's easy to see him as a character in one of his own stories: a writer alone struggling to survive in a publishing universe hostile to any book that can't be conveniently slotted to a genre niche. Fortunately, he has achieved versatility by benefit of his restless imagination more than by any deliberate effort to resist pigeonholing. "I have an unfortunate proclivity for getting tired of doing certain types of stories. I think my career would have gone much higher had I stuck with the fantasy/horror type story. But I got tired of it. So I wrote a book for kids, and five western novels. I wanted to write a love story, so I wrote Bid Time Return. And I wanted to write a story about life after death, so I wrote What Dreams May Come."
Ordinary Origins
Richard Burton Matheson was born February 20, 1926, in Allendale, N.J., and spent his childhood in Brooklyn. His parents emigrated separately from Norway, and he speculates that some of the paranoia that pervades his fiction distilled from the atmosphere of an insular household where people sensed themselves outsiders in an alien country. Although he published stories and poems as a child in local newspapers, Matheson had no ambition to write professionally until after serving in the Army (he saw action in World War II) and graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism in 1949. He sold his first story, "Born of Man and Woman," in 1950, while working a job typing up address plates for magazines. The narrative of a mutant child kept prisoner in the basement of the family home, it met with instant acclaim and opened doors for Matheson in the fields of fantasy and science fiction. It also introduced the theme that would come to dominate his writing: the unusual occurring in the midst of the home, the family, the commonplace. "I've never been good at writing stories about the distant future, or distant galaxies," says Matheson. "I've never been able to write things like Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings. I'm stuck in the here and now."
The here and now, as Matheson has rendered it, is suburban neighborhoods and typical American households cluttered with familiar artifacts of daily life and inhabited by average working guys, housewives and kids. In other words, it's the experience Matheson and many of his readers were living at the time. His technique, he explains, was "to impose a unique perspective" on that situation. A perfect example is his novel The Shrinking Man, whose diminishing protagonist finds the ordinary world becoming increasingly menacing and dangerous. By the novel's end, he is trapped in his own basement. "When I wrote The Shrinking Man, we lived in a house on Long Island and there was a rocking chair in the cellar. I used to sit down there and watch creatively what my little man was doing. I didn't have to do research because the research was right in front of me."
Solid grounding of his fiction in a recognizable reality that people can relate to also helped Matheson's screenwriting. "I'm a visual writer," he explains. "I see things visually and describe them visually. That's why I was able to write scripts from the very first assignment I had." Indeed, he sold the film rights to The Shrinking Man with the stipulation that he write the screenplay—a policy he has followed ever since. The film, which was released as The Incredible Shrinking Man in 1957, proved a success and his ticket to Hollywood. Since then Matheson has seen an impressive number of his works adapted for the big screen: The Beardless Warriors, based on his wartime experiences (adapted as The Young Warriors); Hell House (adapted as The Legend of Hell House); Bid Time Return (adapted as Somewhere in Time); What Dreams May Come; and A Stir of Echoes, to name a few. For years, Tinseltown trade publications and the Net have been abuzz with "news" on the supposed casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith and other box office heavyweights as the lead in a new adaptation of I Am Legend (filmed twice already, as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man).
Matheson's fiction output decreased as he assumed more screen assignments and, he tells PW, as he shouldered anxieties about financial security and providing for his wife and four children. He stopped writing short stories in the early 1970s, almost exactly 20 years after they launched his career. "The paranoiac theme of one man against insuperable odds runs through all my stories from that 20-year period. 'Duel,' which was published in 1971, is about a paranoiac as you can get. After that I felt no desire to write short stories." With the publication of his time travel love story, Bid Time Return, in 1975, he all but turned his back on the horror and science fiction that made his reputation.
In the last few years Matheson has been a more imposing presence in the publishing scene than just his backlist would warrant thanks to interest among specialty houses in his previously unpublished fiction. Last year, Gauntlet Press published Hunger and Thirst, a novel of grim realism that Matheson wrote when he was 26. The recently released Abu and the Seven Marvels, his Arabian Nights fantasy for children, is a book that he was not able to sell more than 40 years ago. Barry Hoffman, publisher and founder of Gauntlet Press, makes no distinction between the new and old Matheson titles he has been publishing since 1995. "Matheson is a Renaissance man, very much like Ray Bradbury," he tells us. "He's written in every genre, but all of his books deal with the human condition. As much as he focuses on the plot, it's the characters in his books that are so unique and come so much to life that you remember them. He talks about things that all of us have experienced and can relate to, and will still 50 or 100 years from now. His books are timeless."
While some writers might feel vindicated that books they were originally told were unpublishable ultimately found an audience, for Matheson their reception is a bittersweet achievement. "I feel sorry they weren't published earlier. If Hunger and Thirst had been published back in my early 20s, I wouldn't have forgone fantasy, because I always enjoyed reading it and writing it. But I might have tried my chances in the so-called straight novel area as well."
Matheson isn't one to waste time regretting alternate futures, especially when he can still live them. In the next decade, he hopes to parlay his skills at writing fiction and screenplays into work in yet another medium: the stage. A suspense mystery incorporating stage magic is already in production and its success will determine whether he'll forge ahead with his dream project, a stage musical of Bid Time Return (for which he has already written the book).
Though mindful of his reputation in the horror and fantasy field, and deeply flattered by the respect of writers who see him as their guru, Matheson is almost sheepish when appraising his achievement. "I put terror in today's society. Which was something new, I guess." But perhaps that's the one thing about Richard Matheson that should come as no surprise: that he sees his craft in the same ordinary terms as the worlds of his enduring fiction. "I have a new collection coming out from Subterranean Press with the title Off Beat. That's how I regard myself as a writer. I take any subject that appeals to me and I take it off a beat. Just to break up the rhythm and present it in a slightly different way. I'm an off beat writer."
