One
of the greats has made it to the Summerland.
Richard
Matheson was one of the true pioneers of speculative fiction and
horror; a prolific workhorse who disguised his genius behind
accessible, unpretentious prose and an empathy for the everyman.
Thanks to 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' we can never get on a plane
without worrying that there might be 'something on the wing!', but
thanks also to 'What Dreams May Come' we know that 'there is more'
waiting for us on the other side, too.
Unlike
Ellison or Simmons or Gaiman or Bester, on whose works I have slowly
sipped, my experience with Matheson's efforts have been more of a
frat party chug; a fast-paced and delirious consumption of his
novels, short stories, and teleplays that is, to date, ongoing and
unlikely to stop. Truly, I only met the man and his brilliance for
the first time a few years ago, but I saw no need to take out
relationship slow: his work is endlessly satisfying and refreshingly
addictive. No one who's read the original 'I Am Legend' will ever be
able to look at the Will Smith flick of the same name and find even
an atavistic shade of its dark resplendence, its wrenching,
unflinching examination of loneliness and private despair. Likewise,
anyone who thinks they know
haunted houses hasn't spent anytime with the original, the best, the
only Hell House. Whether he was writing about a deranged department store clerk going
mad before lunch or a coven of witches turned into weapons by the
U.S. Military, Matheson made the unknowable known (whether we liked
it or not) and was more than wiling to remind us that the monster was
us all along. He inspired Stephen King, who shamelessly and with
pride admitted he outright ripped off Matheson on more than one
occasion, not to mention a host of other writers (yours truly
included) who jealously tried to mimic his elegant approach to the
awful and awe-ful, always somehow falling short. And for those of us
who saw The Twilight Zone as
a mirror held uncomfortably close to our own world, Matheson's ideas
had no equal.
Many
of his works were permeated with the precepts of parapsychology and
the concept of the mind as an energy field that survives physical
death, a notion that made his ghost stories frighteningly plausible
and made his seminal 'What Dreams May Come' an inspiration to
millions. When you die, Matheson postulated, you are still the same
person you were on Earth: the same hopes, the same failings, the same
ambitions. 'Death,' he said, 'is simply continuation on another
level' and Heaven is 'a state of mind', a place where one builds a
house wrought from the good deeds and loving relationships fostered
for all eternity.
I
hope Mr. Matheson was right on that one, because I hope one day to
visit that house. Perhaps he'll have me for tea and we can discuss
the finer points of writing. I know he'll have a great view with a
fine balcony and he won't begrudge me smoking a pinch or two of
Balkan Supreme. In the meantime I can only continue to quaff his
great works at a fever pace, and hope for a day when I might be able
to say half as much as he had to say with one tenth the aplomb.
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