Richard Matheson

• Born: February 20, 1926
• Birthplace: Allendale, New Jersey
• Died: June 23, 2013

American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter

Biography

The novelist, short-story writer, and scriptwriter Richard Burton Matheson revolutionized American supernatural fiction by injecting elements of the horrific into everyday situations. He was born in Allendale, New Jersey, in 1926 to Norwegian immigrants. Neither of his parents encouraged him to write, but Matheson began writing poems and stories at the age of seven. Following a childhood in Brooklyn he graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1943. During World War II he served with the US Army, an experience he later incorporated into his novel The Beardless Warriors (1960).

Matheson's career as a professional fiction writer began after he earned a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Unable to find a job in journalism, he began writing science-fiction stories because the genre was selling well at the time. Yet his stories did not lend themselves to easy categorization as either science fiction or fantasy, lacking both the rational, scientific explanations of true science fiction and the fantastical or otherworldly settings that were characteristic of fantasy at the time. Rather, Matheson’s stories bring the unexplainable into the so-called real world, often featuring as main characters ordinary people who discover that terror lurks beneath the familiar, comfortable veneer of reality—a conceit that has since become significantly more popular in the genre. His work represents a breakthrough in American horror fiction, which up to that time had been dominated by the influence of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer of the 1920s and 1930s whose characters are terrorized by mythical gods.

In February 1950, Matheson sold his first story, “Born of Man and Woman,” the tale of a mutant child chained in a basement. Matheson later elaborated on the idea of a trapped protagonist in his novel I Am Legend (1954), whose hero, a Californian who takes it upon himself to rid the world of vampires, resembles the single-minded males of his short stories. The suburban setting is another characteristic that Matheson transferred to the novel from his short stories. The novel bears a closer resemblance to science fiction than to horror because Matheson presents a scientific explanation, though not a very sound one, for the plague of vampires. With the publication of this novel, Matheson’s reputation as a science-fiction writer became firmly established.

Matheson’s next novel, The Shrinking Man (1956), received enormous critical acclaim. Published two years after I Am Legend, this novel, like other science-fiction novels of the 1950s, reflects the paranoia prevalent during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In this work, too, the hero, Scott Carey, is an ordinary, flawed man who, through an implausible scientific process, is trapped in a hostile world. The association of sex with death and revulsion, which is evident in several of Matheson’s earlier stories, is also present here. The Shrinking Man can be interpreted as a statement on human alienation and approaches allegory. Aside from the many innovations that I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man contain, they also depart from the conventional happy endings that were popular in science-fiction novels of the 1950s.

During the 1960s Matheson wrote screenplays for a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In his loose adaptations of such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Matheson builds up the horror gradually. His screenplays are strongest when they deal with the central theme of his best short stories: persecution.

Although Matheson’s first two novels can be loosely classified as science fiction, many of his later novels are more accurately described as supernatural fantasies. Bid Time Return (1975) combines the time-travel motif with the romantic love story. In this novel Matheson dispenses with scientific explanations; his hero simply wills himself back to the nineteenth century. His next novel, What Dreams May Come (1978), is another love story in a fantasy context. In its hero’s attempt to reunite himself with his wife in the afterlife, the novel bears a close resemblance to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Earthbound (1982) is the revision of a psychological ghost story Matheson wrote when he was twelve years old. With this novel Matheson dispensed with the science-fiction framework of his earlier novels and stories.

In the 1993 novel Seven Steps to Midnight, it first appears that the hero, Chris Barton, is struggling against covert agencies and supernatural forces. Elements of the fantastic seem to play a crucial role in the novel until Matheson’s concluding revelation that the apparently supernatural events were caused by humans and all have rational explanations. This novel signaled a new phase of Matheson’s work, one in which appearances are deceiving and reality is hard to define. Matheson continued this trend in his 1995 novel, Now You See It . . ., which concerns the intricate deceptions practiced by an illusionist and his wife.

Hunger and Thirst (2000) was actually the first novel Matheson wrote; he completed the manuscript in 1950, but his agent told him it was unpublishable. The story of a man lying paralyzed and dying from a gunshot wound received in a botched robbery, Hunger and Thirst shows what skill Matheson had as a writer even at the beginning of his career. Passion Play (2000) was another fifty-year-old manuscript retrieved from the drawer, this one a noir murder mystery involving a door-to-door salesman and a seductive blonde. Camp Pleasant (2001) is a short novel about a murder at a summer camp, depicting the brutality of the head of the camp, whom, in standard mystery fashion, everyone has a motive to kill. Hunted Past Reason (2002) is a horrific take on Hemingway-esque outdoors fiction, in which two men take a hiking trip that turns into a kill-or-be-killed contest. Come Fygures, Come Shadowes (2003) is a novel that Matheson began writing in the 1970s, at which time he estimated it would be two thousand pages long. Dissuaded from completing it by his editor, he published parts of the novel in short-story form; finally the completed section of the novel, which holds together without the eighteen-thousand-odd words Matheson never got around to writing, was published in 2003. The story takes place in the 1930s and concerns a young woman whose mother forces her daughter to follow in her footsteps as a professional medium.

Matheson's 2005 novel, Woman, was originally intended as a play. In it, a clichéd "war between the sexes" setup transforms into something far more chilling. Horror-fiction critics June M. Pulliam and Anthony J. Fonseca noted that while "Woman is in no way one of Matheson's best novels . . . it does serve as an example of the author's preoccupation with the theories of masculinity and femininity—and may well be his best statement on women's rights." Other Kingdoms (2011) has an atypically autobiographical bent, featuring as it does a war veteran (in this case, World War I) turned horror-fiction writer, while its tone recalls the dark supernatural romance of Bid Time Return and What Dreams May Come.

Matheson's final published novel, Generations (2012), is a significant departure from his previous work. Forgoing all trappings of genre, Generations, set in the 1950s, is an explicitly autobiographical novel that uses Matheson's real family and real-life circumstances as a jumping-off point to relate the events of a fictional gathering following the funeral of Matheson's father. In the introduction, Matheson writes, "The events described never took place—though I believe they could have and should have." While the novel was not well reviewed, Matheson fans and scholars alike found it valuable for the wealth of new information it provided about the author's own life.

Although Matheson’s style became less ornate with each successive novel, the themes of his work remained unchanged. He shunned the mythic landscape preferred by his forerunners in favor of the contemporary world, where stress, not some primordial demon, is the real evil. Many readers can easily identify with Matheson’s alienated protagonists, who often fear persecution from a real or unreal enemy. The traps into which they fall resemble the pitfalls facing ordinary people. Just as his protagonists find themselves locked in a giant oven or a casket underground, so do many people feel trapped in boring jobs, failed marriages, or self-destructive lifestyles. Matheson was one of the twentieth century’s premier fantasists, the power of whose writing derived from his method of injecting only a small amount of fantasy into real life.

Matheson married Ruth Ann Woodson in 1952. The couple had two sons, Richard Christian (known as R. C.) and Chris, and two daughters, Bettina and Ali Marie. Matheson died at his home in Calabasas, California, on June 23, 2013, at the age of eighty-seven.

Bibliography

Brejla, Terry. The Devils of His Own Creation: The Life and Work of Richard Matheson. Writers Club Press, 2002.

Neilson, Keith. “Richard Matheson.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003, pp. 673–84.

Oakes, David A. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, and King. Greenwood Press, 2000.

Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Weber, Bruce. “Richard Matheson, Writer of Haunted Science Fiction and Horror, Dies at 87.” The New York Times, 25 June 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/books/richard-matheson-writer-of-haunted-science-fiction-and-horror-dies-at-87.html. Accessed 21 Apr. 2017.

Wiater, Stanley, et al., editors. The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. 2007. Citadel Press, 2009.