Why You're an Idiot for Not Reading Richard Matheson

It's impossible for me to talk about Richard Matheson without talking about horror and science fiction. But first an introduction. Matheson has published 28 novels and 100 short stories. He's written several screenplays based on his works and contributed episodes to The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. His influence on speculative fiction and horror is astronomical.

That said, horror is sort of a pet genre of mine. It's arguably the most culturally important genre of fiction due to the fact that it gives a window into a culture's values. Horror is the representation of every fear, every space of ignorance, and every thought we as a society repress to our shadow selves. The werewolf is the personification of emotion unleashed, the id made flesh. The vampire is venereal disease and wasting death in an anthropomorphic package. Witches (as perceived by Westerners) are the nightmare of the misogynist and anyone else who fears feminine power and sexuality. The list goes on.

Consequently, horror is much more difficult to write than most people imagine. It's psychological. It gets under your skin. In my book Exalt of the Weird I go into detail about the different approaches to horror that are primarily split into the difference between spooky and creepy. Matheson is one of the few writers who can ably do both. No easy feat I assure you.

To write horror requires a subtle touch. You must create a balance between the audience's dread and their desire to know how things will end. That tension is at the core of good horror fiction. The climactic final act of Hitchcock's Psycho in which the two protagonists attempt to distract Norman Bates and break into his house to find Mrs. Bates is one of the most gut-wrenching sequences in cinematic history. The viewer is practically screaming at the screen, "Don't go in there!" and yet they continue watching because the not knowing is more terrible than seeing the outcome.

Human psychology proves time and again that people will always be much better at scaring themselves than other people will be at scaring them. Provided of course you get them in the proper frame of mind (i.e. paranoid, suspicious, panicky, etc.). Too often you see movie after movie, game after game, and book after book try to sledgehammer you into being scared. But that will never be anywhere near as effective. Neil Gaiman once said of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, "I never wanted to be the first one to draw a shoggoth because then people would look at it and say, 'Oh, that's what one looks like. I thought it would be weirder.'"

Matheson excelled at getting into the readers' heads, sometimes through a masterful use of unconventional narrative or 1st person perspective. He would use this to convey paranoia, madness, and isolation with visceral tension and intensity.

He was also a master science fiction and fantasy, authoring such works as "I Am Legend" and "What Dreams May Come." As I mentioned prior, he also contributed episodes to The Twilight Zone, which I assure you will have its own spotlight in this blog before long. Speculative fiction when done well is less about the science or the fantastic and all about the people and how they react to it. Matheson understands this. His stories are always about people.

So often magic tries to create a fantasy and screws that up by losing the human element. It becomes another footnote in forgettable 9th-rate entertainment like any movie Seltzer and Friedberg have produced. It's easy to get caught up in the fantastic elements of speculative fiction, but doing so is the kiss of death. Star Trek: the Next Generation made this mistake early on before the writers caught on to what made the original series so loved by fans.

For these reasons, I'm recommending you, my readers, go out and get a collection of Matheson's short stories. For the sake of argument, I'm going to recommend "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" due to some of the incredibly innovative and just generally scary as hell material. Pay attention to how the stories alternate between themes of madness and the supernatural, and that when the latter is involved it goes deliberately unexplained. To repeat, people are much better at scaring themselves than you are. Make that a strength.