The Best of Richard Matheson - A Short Story Collection

I don’t remember what prompted me to check this book out of my local library.  I must have read a reference to Matheson’s short stories and went looking for it.  The only thing I had read of Matheson’s before this is the first volume of his collection of Twilight Zone scripts, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I’ve enjoyed many movies adapted from his writing, but never his prose fiction directly.

This 400 page collection of 33 short stories is an interesting and fun read.  Matheson writes in a loose, relaxed prose style that feels simultaneously common and elevated.  He has several great turns of phrases and surprising descriptions that signals his great command of the English language.  Here’s a quick sample from his opening paragraphs of the “Witch War”: “Seven pretty little girls sitting in a row.  Outside, night, pouring rain—war weather. . . . Sky clearing its throat with thunder, picking and dropping lint lightning from immeasurable shoulders.”  Those poetic phrasings are sparsely made, but each one gives a great punch.  Otherwise, the stories consist of simple description and plenty of dialogue.  It is typical mid-20^th-century American literature in its presentation—one of my favorite periods for literature.

Many of the stories themselves have a taste of the supernatural, some leaning toward horror, others leaning toward science fiction, but all of them interesting page-turners.  I was surprised by how many stories were familiar to me, either because they were adapted for film or TV (such as “Prey,” “Death Ship,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “Third from the Sun,” “Duel,” and “Button Button”), or because they seemed to be part of the zeitgeist of the 50s and 60s literature.  Most of the stories have a gimmick or a surprise ending, which you can feel from the start of the story.  An interesting situation or premise is introduced, and then you wait to have it explained to you, speculating along the way (or searching your memory if the story feels vaguely familiar).  The weakest stories have little more than resolution or explanation you are waiting for, such as “Third from the Sun.”  The best stories have a conflict rooted in human needs and emotions, such as “Button, Button,” “Dance of the Dead,” “Dying Room Only,” and “Duel.”

The other thing on display in this collection is Matheson’s ability to pace a story, to create movement and acts even within a seemingly straightforward story.  It does not surprise me that his stories are often picked up for film and television.  Not only is he a visual and sensory writer, but he has a gift for building tension through slowly escalating actions by the protagonist.  There is a lot to learn here about the way a short story is constructed.

As I read the collection, I kept comparing it to the collection of Roald Dahl stories I have (also called The Best of . . .).  The two share a lot of storytelling techniques and tastes.  Both are wonderful and dialogue, both are masters of pacing, and both construct sentences that appear effortlessly written.  I kept trying to pinpoint what it was about Dahl’s writing that I favored, and in the end I decided that it had little to do with the writing itself and everything to do with the type of stories he was interested in telling.  In Dahl’s short stories, the conflicts and tensions are rooted in two or more characters talking to each other, attempting to navigate the difficult terrain to get what they want.  In the end, Matheson’s characters’ interactions, while interesting, seldom make a difference to the story.  Take “Dance of the Dead,” for example, probably my favorite in the collection.  The kids pressuring our young heroine makes for great tension.  I worried for her for the whole length of the story.  But in the end, my worry was a red herring.  The story wasn’t interested in her treatment or mistreatment, only in an interesting way to tell the story of the LUPs.  The characters are props, parts of the scenery in the end.  The stories are still cool; they just don’t hang at the places I find most interesting as a reader.

I recommend this collection, because it is an enjoyable read throughout.  I’ll now be going back to read (and watch) Matheson’s Twilight Zone stories.  But will I go pick up one of his novels?  I’m not sure at this point.

The Unknown in The Turn of the Screw

*Spoilers dot the landscape of this post like ghosts in a Gothic horror novel.  Be warned.*

I had read Henry James’s Turn of the Screw back in my graduate school days in the mid-1990s, and I enjoyed it thoroughly then.  I picked it back up after seeing Floria Sigismondi’s flawed cinematic interpretation of the novel earlier this year.  In criticizing the film, I wanted to reread the novel to make sure I understood the source material. So here we are.

While I enjoy reading James’s prose, I found myself having a rather hard time following the action of the novel.  In part, it was due to James’s long sentences filled with subordinate clauses.  But confusion arising from his sentences was short-lived as a rereading readily cleared things up.  In part, it was due to my reading the book aloud to my wife at night before sleeping, which made me want to reread as little as possible for her listening enjoyment, though I admit I had to anyway just to find the cadence of the sentence which I sometimes lost amidst his clauses.  But of course, the real difficulty comes from the narrator’s desire to speak delicately of her subject.  Much is left alluded to and unstated in the novel, which invites the reader to fill in those blanks, just as the narrator herself fills in the blanks of the mystery that she finds herself in the center of.

It occurs to me this time around that this notion of holes in a narrative and our eagerness to fill in those holes is central to the novel.  Admittedly, when I first read the novel, I was really into it _as_ a ghost story.  I aligned myself fully with the narrator and enjoyed her worries and speculations as though they were my own.  (And that was as a graduate student of literature?! I am as surprised as you.)  But on this read, I was acutely aware of all the leaps the narrator takes in unraveling the mystery before her.  In fact, her leaps actively create the mystery that she is determined to unravel.  When she first spies Quint on the crenelated towers of Bly, she knows nothing about him.  That chapter, the third chapter, ends thus: “He walked away; that was all I knew.”  That matter of knowing is central to the tale.  When Quint appears to her again, this time looking through the dining room window, we are told: “On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come. He had come for some one else. The flash of knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst of dread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect.”  When she knows Quint is looking for another, she calls it first a “certitude” and then goes out of her way to label that knowing as “knowledge” as opposed to a suspicion.  She makes her leaps of knowledge again and again in the novel.  She is certain that Flora sees Miss Jessel, without any indication.  She is certain that Quint and Jessel want the children.  She is certain that Miles distracts her so that Flora can get away to meet Jessel.  And at each of these leaps, the narrator gives no basis for her insight, only that she _knows_ it to be true.  If it happened once, it would be a convenient plot device.  The repetition speaks of purpose.

Of course the central debate about the book is whether there are really ghosts or whether it is all in the narrator’s mind.  The debate at this point is as traditional as the debates concerning Hamlet, so I see no reason to retread that ground here.  Instead, I’ll say that we as readers are put in the same position as the narrator, faced with a bunch of mysterious holes and the need to fill them in for ourselves.  As nature abhors a vacuum so we humans abhor uncertainty.  The unexplained is precisely where our minds grasp at any and all evidence to create meaning and a consistent narrative.

There are a few holes that the narrator refuses to fill in spite of all her certainty.  The central hole, of course, is the reason for Miles’s suspension from school.  This is the central mystery that pre-dates Quint’s appearance on the tower, the moment that sends the narrator’s mind skipping over possibilities.  How could an angelic boy like Miles do anything wrong.  The suspension must either be the fault of the schools, because Miles is innocent, or evidence that Miles is morally compromised.  That uncertainty the narrator cannot brook, but cannot solve either.  Quint and Jessel are manifestations of the corruption stalking the innocent souls.  (Yes, see me filling holes and creating narrative?)  The striking part of the novel is that it never fills in that hole at all; we never know why Miles is suspended from school.  So if we are to find satisfaction in the ending, we need to fill that hole in for ourselves, or at least entertain what it might be.  So let me offer my reading.

Miles says his major error was that he “said things” to “only a few.  Those I liked.”  The narrator cannot make heads or tails of that, but Miles conjectures that those he told “must have repeated” his words “to those they liked.”  I am assuming that Miles was either at an all-boys boarding school (oh, the holes keep getting filled!), and that the people he “liked” were fellow boys.  It seems to me (with my backhoe) that Miles must have expressed love and affection for “those [he] liked,” and his words of love were received by the headmasters as a homosexual threat to be rooted out.  Miles is treated disturbingly sexually by the narrator throughout the book (“We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at an inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.”—ew), so it seems fitting to make the logical leap that other adults view the 10-year-old's actions through the lens of adulthood as well.

The book is a quick and satisfying read, not one that can be undertaken in a distracted state.  It requires a lot of attention, but it rewards a lot of close reading, since the holes are everywhere with piles of literary dirt just waiting to be shifted about.  If you can find a copy of Tor’s 1993 edition, I highly recommend it—the cover rocks.