Screenwriter, Novelist, Short story writer, Playwright
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Richard Burton Matheson
Though Richard Matheson is usually characterized as a writer of horror or terror stories, the most immediately striking aspect of his writing is the essential ordinariness of his characters and the prosaism of their predicaments. Matheson's is a fiction at the furthest remove from the Faustian quests of classic American literature. His characters are neither "heaped" by history, possessed by a "world elsewhere," nor driven by desire. Even in the throes of their imagined agonies, his comfortable, middle-class, male protagonists display a bland suburban reasonableness. They respond to the situations thrust upon them with a plucky pragmatism that reminds one less of a gothic hero than of those ineffective but well-meaning fathers in a 1950s or 1960s television series. But surely in adversity William Bendix, Robert Young, and Ozzie Nelson showed more wit, charm, and endearing awareness of their own faults than Matheson's serious, sentimental, and self-pitying family men.
Thus it is somewhat surprising that Matheson, far from dissociating himself from his heroes, goes to some lengths to emphasize their biographical similarity to himself. He was born the same date as Richard Collier, the narrator of Bid Time Return (1975); he saw action at the age of eighteen in France and Germany during the last two years of World War II like Hackermeyer, the hero of The Beardless Warriors (1960); he was awarded a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1949 like Collier again; and he lives with his family in Woodland Hills, California, supporting himself with his television and fiction writing like Chris Nelson, the writer-narrator of What Dreams May Come (1978).
The early novels typically present a lonely, half-heroic protagonist warring always nobly yet ineffectually against a hostile or indifferent environment. The consciousness of the central character, his sense of isolation and powerlessness, the narration of his feelings and his actions make up the plot. In I Am Legend (1954) this central character is Robert Neville, the last survivor of a modern plague that turns everyone but him into a vampire. The Shrinking Man (1956) presents Scott Carey's feelings as he mysteriously shrinks away to nothing. A Stir of Echoes (1958) shows Tom Wallace overwhelmed by his perceptions when he suddenly becomes able to read minds and predict the future; he becomes an outsider to his family and community. The Beardless Warriors describes Everett Hackermeyer's consciousness during his first frightened week in combat during World War II. There is almost no "context" around a Matheson text; even in The Beardless Warriors, the war exists only as a stimulus for Hackermeyer's adolescent reflections and reactions. But this emphasis on the consciousness of one character is potentially what makes these novels most interesting. If they turn away from the outer spaces of society and history, it is to be all the more free to navigate the inner spaces of a character's mind, to take the reader on an inner journey of discovery. Unfortunately, these novels turn out all too often to be tours of tidy assumptions, cliches of feelings, and unexamined and ultimately reassuring habits of mind. There is no real exploration here, and hence no real discovery. The Beardless Warriors takes as its epigraph a line from Marianne Moore's "In Distrust of Merits": "There never was a war that was not inward"; but it is just this inner war (or inner revelation) that Matheson leaves his readers still questing for.
During the 1960s Matheson turned increasingly to television and film work. He was a major writer for "The Twilight Zone" (contributing sixteen episodes) and produced scripts for "The Chrylser Playhouse," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "Star Trek," "Thriller," and "Night Gallery" as well. In between television scripts and screenplays he wrote more than fifty short stories published in a successful series of Dell paperbacks: Shock! (1961), Shock II (1964), Shock III (1966), and Shock Waves (1970).
Matheson's three most recent novels deal with psychic phenomena. In Hell House (1971) four people investigate the "Mt. Everest of haunted houses." In Bid Time Return Richard Collier visits the Coronado Hotel, falls in love with a seventy-five-year-old photograph of an actress, and succeeds in going back in time to spend a few days with her. What Dreams May Come presents a manuscript dictated to a psychic by Chris Neilsen about his death and afterlife in Summerland, Matheson's version of heaven. These last two novels present a mellowed Matheson. In place of the earlier expenses of spirit, Matheson presents expanses of spirit, plastic consciousness capable of melting into the past, the future, or one another. These latest novels are meant to be grand affirmations of the power of the human mind. But has anything actually changed in Matheson's comfy, middle-class novelistic world? The swoony transparency of these selves, their mode of trite transcendence, this mysticism for the masses, is simply the flip side of the earlier characters' woozy, sentimental impotence. One form of softness replaces another in this soft-focus vision of selves without firmness, depth, or center. The emasculated escapism of the Eisenhower years is transformed into the bland reveries of the est generation. Indeed, to consider seriously Matheson's version of heaven, his suburban, respectable, bourgeois, and above all cozy and safe Summerland, is to ask as Henry James did in his essay "Is There a Life After Death"": "How can there be a personal and differentiated life 'after,' for those for whom there is so little of one before?
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