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...