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Book Review: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet – Horror Stories by Richard Matheson
Summary:
Remember that monster on the wing of the airplane? William Shatner saw it on The Twilight Zone and Bart Simpson saw it too. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is just one of many classic horror stories by Richard Matheson that have insinuated themselves into our collective imagination.
Here are more than twenty of Matheson’s most memorable tales of fear and paranoia. Personally selected by Richard Matheson, the bestselling author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, these and many other stories, more than demonstrate why he is rightfully regarded as one of the finest and most influential horror writers of our generation.
Review:
I picked this up because I remembered enjoying I Am Legend (although my review is only 3 stars, when I looked it up just now…) I also had familiarity with The Twilight Zone episode based on the first story in the collection. I individually rated each of the twenty stories then calculated the average to give the collection a rating.
I rated two stories 5 stars. “Mad House” (made me make shocked and thrilled faces) and “First Anniversary” (I called it timeless in my notes). The former is a very meta commentary on being a writer. The latter reminded me of Buffy in that who you’ve fallen in love with changes, only in this case it was the woman changing instead of the man.
There were quite a few stories that I found moderately engaging and enjoyed their historic vibe. Like “Disappearing Act,” whose whole idea is it’s someone’s personal notebook left in a cafe. Or “Crickets” whose idea is what if crickets’ chirps are really a form of Morse code?
But there are also two stories where, just, the entire structure idea is racist. One “The Children of Noah” involves the idea that a town’s inhabitants are all the descendants of a sea captain and his Pacific Islander bride. The racist part is that they’re dangerous BECAUSE of being part Pacific Islander. The story “Prey” is about a “Zuni” doll that’s inhabited by the spirit of a great warrior. The whole idea made me cringe. One story, “The Distributor” confused me so much that I’m still not sure what the overall point was. A character who I think is a bad guy uses the the n word and another racial slur, but it’s a little unclear to me if he was meant to be a bad guy.
There are also definitely outdated gender ideas here. The least offensive is that it’s oh so scary for teenage girls to wage war as witches in “Witch War.” The worst is “The Likeness of Julie.” Most of the story is from the perspective of a college undergrad male rapist. That’s bad enough. If you want to know how it manages to get worse, check out the spoiler paragraph below in brackets.
[The twist ending is that the college woman he rapes, Julie, in fact got inside his mind supernaturally and made him rape her. It’s the worst victim blaming I’ve seen in forever, and I honestly wanted to scrub my own brain out with soap. I’m suspicious that Matheson knew on some level how awful this story was, because the collection notes that he published it under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson in Alone by Night, which appears to have been some sort of anthology.]
So, there we have it. Some stories manage to be timeless. But definitely not all. Come into this collection prepared for a mixed bag.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 336 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Purchased
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Book Review: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Summary:
A worldwide virus pandemic has turned most of the world’s population into vampires–both alive and undead. Robert Neville might, quite possibly, be the only uninfected left. Every day he goes out on his quest to simply kill the vampires while they sleep. Every night he curls up in sound-proofed home drinking whiskey and listening to records. Will anything ever save him from this monotonous existence?
Review:
It’s difficult to read a highly influential scifi book that inspired both the trend of writing of a worldwide pandemic and the original Night of the Living Dead and find that you actually are a bit unimpressed by it. I was simply expecting more from such an influential book.
Claustrophobic. That is the best word to describe the book, and it is also what Matheson excels at. Depicting the effects of painful ostracism and loneliness on a person’s psyche. For Robert isn’t alone per se. He is surrounded by those infected with the virus. Yet he can’t hang out with them or converse logically with them. They are entirely at odds, and whereas the infected have each other, Neville has no one. What this book depicts is what happens when the world moves on, and someone is left behind. This is truly well done and what makes the book periodically powerful.
Yet it struggles with things, particularly the most simple story-telling and pacing. The order of events is disjointed and difficult to make sense of. Neville is a rather unsympathetic character because we only get rare glimpses into his past life before the apocalypse. His relationship with Ben Cortman, an infected neighbor, is built up to be important and influential, yet it is dropped at the last minute. One plot point in particular toward the end of the book truly makes very little sense. The actions of the infected seem to be ludicrous at best. At the base of it, we see Neville’s insanity much more clearly than we see his previous sanity, which makes his gradual changes due to loneliness less powerful. Thus, both the characterization and the plot suffer from a certain ever-present disjointedness.
This reads as a great idea that was a bit poorly executed. Perhaps this is why it has inspired so much other creativity. The germ of the idea is excellent and easy to ponder upon in spite of a far less sophisticated story-telling. I thus mostly recommend this to fans of the worldwide pandemic or Night of the Living Dead franchise to see where it all started. Those who are intrigued by the look at ostracism may enjoy it as well, but others probably should steer clear.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Borrowed