A review by macheath
The Best of Richard Matheson by Richard Matheson

dark tense fast-paced

4.0

A pretty extensive selection edited by Victor LaValle. Some stories were rereads for me ("Prey," "Duel" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), some were first reads. Matheson was a master of the type of fiction published in the genre magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, with all the positives and negatives that mastery implies: he was a slicker read than Bradbury, for example, but was less fanciful or poetic. When Matheson tries to do Bradbury-style sentimentality and nostalgia he falls flat; he's much better when he's barreling toward a nasty shock ending. A few of Matheson's stories verge on the experimental, and those were the ones I thought most highly of ("Born of Man and Woman" and "Dance of the Dead," for example). There were a few too many EC Comics-style "surprise vampire" stories for my taste. Worth reading if you're familiar with Matheson's novels or the stories he adapted for The Twilight Zone.