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A review by jdhacker
The Best of Richard Matheson by Richard Matheson
3.0
Full disclosure, I received a free copy of this for review purposes.
For starters, I while I will not claim to have read/watched everything Richard Matheson has written, I have read the vast majority of it. I’m not sure that was an advantage going into this new ‘best of’ collection.
Honestly, I’m a little unclear what Penguin was going for with this collection, something which is made no more clear from the introduction (did that writer also select/organize the collection? Was he just an author/fan selected to write the intro?). Having read the majority of his work, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a best of even his short fiction. While there are some real gems in this collection, there are also startling omissions if that was the point, and there are some real snoozers included. Nor is it necessarily a collection of his most well known works...because again there are some obvious stars (several twilight zone episodes, for example), there are a lot of obscure ephemera as well. It’s certainly not selected and organized to show developments or authorial trends over time, as publication dates are not included (and the various stories are in fact not arranged in chronological order). They don’t seem to be selected based on genre (sf, horror, film, tv), or even have the most representative example of each chosen. So mostly I did a lot of head scratching while recovering literary territory some of which I enjoy a great deal and some of which I don’t particularly care for. I think Penguin needed to put a little more thought into this overall, and if you want a good completionist set of Matheson short fiction i’d Instead recommend this three volume set (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219539.Collected_Stories_Vol_1).
The intro isn’t particularly illuminating as to overarching point, but does make an interesting observation. The author of the intro states this collection gave him something Matheson has always given him, this sense of sudden intrusion of the strange/bizarre/unreal into the otherwise ordinary. He then goes on to relate a personal experience reflective of this experience and draws parallels between that experience and the stories. After digesting so much Matheson, that was never my take-away, instead I always saw these dysfunctional relationships (romantic or otherwise) between men and women at the heart of his writing (perhaps reflective of the views of women and their role in society during much of his prime writing years). But perhaps that is the real genius of Matheson’s concise, easily accessible, uncomplicated writing: like the cave on Dagobah, we can each get from it what we bring to it. It’s very directness and lack of ornamentation allows us to read into it what we are predisposed to find there.
For starters, I while I will not claim to have read/watched everything Richard Matheson has written, I have read the vast majority of it. I’m not sure that was an advantage going into this new ‘best of’ collection.
Honestly, I’m a little unclear what Penguin was going for with this collection, something which is made no more clear from the introduction (did that writer also select/organize the collection? Was he just an author/fan selected to write the intro?). Having read the majority of his work, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a best of even his short fiction. While there are some real gems in this collection, there are also startling omissions if that was the point, and there are some real snoozers included. Nor is it necessarily a collection of his most well known works...because again there are some obvious stars (several twilight zone episodes, for example), there are a lot of obscure ephemera as well. It’s certainly not selected and organized to show developments or authorial trends over time, as publication dates are not included (and the various stories are in fact not arranged in chronological order). They don’t seem to be selected based on genre (sf, horror, film, tv), or even have the most representative example of each chosen. So mostly I did a lot of head scratching while recovering literary territory some of which I enjoy a great deal and some of which I don’t particularly care for. I think Penguin needed to put a little more thought into this overall, and if you want a good completionist set of Matheson short fiction i’d Instead recommend this three volume set (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219539.Collected_Stories_Vol_1).
The intro isn’t particularly illuminating as to overarching point, but does make an interesting observation. The author of the intro states this collection gave him something Matheson has always given him, this sense of sudden intrusion of the strange/bizarre/unreal into the otherwise ordinary. He then goes on to relate a personal experience reflective of this experience and draws parallels between that experience and the stories. After digesting so much Matheson, that was never my take-away, instead I always saw these dysfunctional relationships (romantic or otherwise) between men and women at the heart of his writing (perhaps reflective of the views of women and their role in society during much of his prime writing years). But perhaps that is the real genius of Matheson’s concise, easily accessible, uncomplicated writing: like the cave on Dagobah, we can each get from it what we bring to it. It’s very directness and lack of ornamentation allows us to read into it what we are predisposed to find there.