Richard Matheson invented more of modern horror than almost anyone and gets credited for less of it than almost anyone.
Stephen King has been explicit about this for fifty years, saying Matheson influenced him more than any other writer, and that I Am Legend showed him horror could happen in a suburb rather than a castle. Anne Rice, Romero, Spielberg, Nolan, the entire architecture of the American apocalypse novel, and a substantial share of what television horror looks like all run back through him.
The reason he isn’t better known is that the adaptations ate him. He wrote sixteen Twilight Zone episodes, including the one with the gremlin on the airplane wing. He wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s first film. Three of his novels have been filmed at least three times each. And the films are almost always worse than the books, and almost always more famous.
He died in 2013 at eighty-seven. This is a guide to the Richard Matheson books actually worth reading.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read I Am Legend. It’s the most influential horror novel of the twentieth century after Dracula, and it takes an evening.
Then The Shrinking Man, which is better than it sounds, or Hell House if you want to be frightened rather than impressed.
The Essential
The Richard Matheson books that changed the genre, and both did it by supplying a mechanism where there had been folklore.
I Am Legend (1954)
Robert Neville is the only human being left in a Los Angeles suburb full of vampires, and the book is about the daily work of that.
The routine is what makes it. Boarding the house before dark. Stringing the garlic. Keeping the generator alive. Driving out at midday to kill them in their sleep, methodically, without pleasure, because it needs doing. Drinking too much in the evenings while they stand outside calling his name. And, gradually, running experiments to pin down what the bacillus actually does, because he’s a man with nothing else left to occupy him.
Matheson handed vampirism to science, which nobody had done before, and out of that single move came the modern pandemic novel, the siege story, and most of what we now call the zombie genre. Romero acknowledged the debt directly: his ghouls started here.
The ending is where the title comes from, and no adaptation has ever had the nerve to keep it. Three films exist, and all three flinch.
More on vampire books and sci-fi horror.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956)
Scott Carey passes through a cloud of radioactive spray on a boat, and afterwards he loses a seventh of an inch every day.
The premise is science fiction, the execution is horror, and the reason it works is that Matheson refuses to let it become spectacle. The novel alternates between the past, as Scott shrinks through the socially catastrophic sizes, and the present, in which he stands an inch tall and lives in the cellar.
The domestic sections are the worst of it. He becomes an object of pity to his wife, then a burden, then something she has to be careful not to step on, and the sexual humiliation gets handled directly, which was unusual for 1956.
The cellar is a survival story with a spider in it, the spider enormous only because he is small, and Matheson works out the physics of every single obstacle.
He wrote the screenplay himself for the 1957 film, and the ending, which is genuinely transcendent, is his.
Hell House (1971)
Rolf Rudolph Deutsch is dying rich and wants the survival question settled, so he buys a week of four people’s lives and puts them inside the Belasco house.
The team: a physicist convinced his machine can drain the place, the physicist’s wife, a spiritual medium, and Ben Fischer, who at fifteen was carried out of the 1940 investigation as the only one still breathing, and who has spent thirty years refusing to discuss it.
The book was written back at The Haunting of Hill House, deliberately, and the quarrel between the two is entirely about method. Jackson’s way is to withhold. Matheson’s is to document: the full history of what Emeric Belasco ran in that house between 1919 and 1929 arrives on the page, itemized, and nothing stays ambiguous.
The Florence Tanner material is the most explicit thing he ever wrote, and the novel runs considerably nastier than anything else in his catalog.
He wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film, The Legend of Hell House, which is very good and much tamer.
Also on haunted house books.
A Stir of Echoes (1958)
Tom Wallace gets hypnotized at a suburban party in Los Angeles as a joke, by his brother-in-law, and it opens something.
Afterwards he can hear what people are thinking, which is the first problem, because the neighbors on his ordinary street have a great deal on their minds and almost none of it is pleasant. Then a young woman starts appearing in his house.
The domestic setting is the whole method, and it’s Matheson’s signature. No castle, no crypt, no ancient evil. A young married couple with a mortgage and a baby coming, a barbecue, a street of people who wave to each other, and a murder that everybody has agreed not to discuss.
Tom’s marriage is the actual subject. Anne can’t follow what’s happening to him, and he can’t explain it, and Matheson writes that failure exactly.
Filmed by David Koepp in 1999 with Kevin Bacon, which relocates it to Chicago and stays faithful in spirit.
What Dreams May Come (1978)
Chris Nielsen dies in a car accident, and the novel is what happens next, and Matheson said it was the only book he wrote that he considered true.
He researched it for years. The afterlife here isn’t invented: it’s assembled from spiritualist literature, theosophy, and published accounts of near-death experiences, and Matheson appended a bibliography of sources because he wanted readers to know he hadn’t made it up.
The horror lives in the second half. Chris’s wife Ann kills herself, and suicides in this system aren’t punished so much as unable to perceive anything beyond their own worst state, and he goes down after her, into a place he may not be able to leave.
Whether that lands depends entirely on whether the sincerity works on you.
Filmed in 1998 with Robin Williams, which won an Oscar for its visual effects and changed the ending substantially.
Somewhere in Time (originally published as Bid Time Return) (1975)
Not horror, and the reason a great many people know his name.
Richard Collier is a screenwriter with an inoperable brain tumor who checks into the Hotel del Coronado to wait it out, sees a photograph of an actress named Elise McKenna who performed there in 1896, and falls in love with her.
He then works out a method. If the room is period-correct, if he removes every modern object, and if he lies there telling himself repeatedly that it is 1896, he can go, and Matheson makes the self-hypnosis procedural and convincing.
It won the World Fantasy Award and was filmed in 1980 as Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. The film failed, then became a cult object with an annual convention at the hotel, which still runs.
Matheson researched the hotel and the period thoroughly, and the novel includes an appendix of his sources.
It’s sentimental, and it’s entirely sincere.
The Short Fiction
The shorter Richard Matheson books and stories, which is where a great deal of the influence actually sits.
This is where much of his best work lives, and where the Twilight Zone connection comes from.
“Duel” (1971) is a salesman on a highway being pursued by a tanker truck whose driver is never seen. Spielberg filmed it as his first feature at twenty-four, and it made his career. The story is a masterclass in withholding: no motive, no face, no explanation.
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (1961) is the gremlin on the wing, and the story runs considerably nastier than either television version, because the man is fresh from a breakdown and knows exactly how this looks.
“Born of Man and Woman” (1950) was his first published story, told in broken diary entries by a child chained in a cellar, and it made his name instantly.
“Prey” (1969) is the Zuni fetish doll, filmed in Trilogy of Terror, and it’s twenty minutes of pure escalation.
The Best of Richard Matheson, edited by Victor LaValle for Penguin, is the collection to buy.
The Screen Work
The part of his output that isn’t in the Richard Matheson books at all, and the reason almost everybody has encountered him without knowing it.
He wrote for television and film continuously, and a substantial part of his cultural footprint sits there rather than in the books.
Sixteen episodes of The Twilight Zone, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with Shatner on the wing, “Little Girl Lost,” and “Steel,” which became the film Real Steel.
Duel (1971), adapted from his own short story, was Steven Spielberg’s first feature. A salesman in a car is pursued across the California desert by a tanker whose driver is never seen, and it was shot for television in sixteen days.
The Night Stalker (1972) was the highest-rated TV movie of its time and produced the Kolchak series, which Chris Carter has repeatedly named as the direct inspiration for The X-Files.
He also wrote four of Roger Corman’s Poe films for AIP, including House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum, with Vincent Price.
That’s an unusually large amount of twentieth-century popular culture for one writer.
Where to Start
Read I Am Legend. It’s about 160 pages, it’s the most influential horror novel since Stoker, and everything you think you know about it from the films is wrong.
Then read “Duel” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, which take an hour between them.
If you want a novel that will surprise you, read The Incredible Shrinking Man, and stay for the cellar.
And if you want to be frightened, read Hell House, knowing it hasn’t aged evenly.
A note on support: this page mentions suicide. If you’re struggling, you don’t have to handle it alone. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Elsewhere, the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centers at iasp.info.
Everything else worth reading is on my best horror books list. I Am Legend rebuilt the vampire as biology, which my vampire books list picks up.
