Short Fiction Month Update:
Richard Matheson is a writer that anyone interested in the horror genre must read. His book Hell House is a classic in the “haunted house” vein; ditto I Am Legend for the vampire genre, and so on. Matheson is also one of the great writers of horror short fiction. Steven Spielberg’s first movie, Duel, is an adaptation of a Matheson story; Steven King has cited Matheson as one of his primary influences. You simply can’t delve into the horror genre in the 20th century without running full-square into Richard Matheson’s work.
I read two stories of his the other night: “The Funeral” and “The Near Departed”. I chose them pretty much at random; they appear in the same collection I own, and after reading “The Funeral” I chose “The Near Departed” because of its very short length. To my surprise, both stories involve a person making a very strange visit to a funeral director. “The Funeral” involves some very odd supernatural content, but interestingly it is “The Near Departed”, with its sly twist-ending, that is the more horrific of the two stories. Both stories exhibit Matheson’s gift for direct, clear prose and matter-of-fact reportage of details, some of which are actually the same in each story. (Each, for example, mentions the funeral director reaching for the pen in the holder.)
