I Am Legend and Other Stories by Richard Matheson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Though the cover gives no indication, this edition actually includes not just the novel I Am Legend, but several short horror stories mostly themed around vampires and other supernatural creatures or events. Traditional African religions form the main plot’s scaffolding of two of the short stories and it’s apparent they are something Matheson was fascinated with, though how accurately he has represented them in his work is a question I am not equipped to answer. One of those two, From Shadowed Places, is as much about prejudice as it is about witchcraft and despite being published in 1960 it is clear Matheson is on the side of equality, problematic as the story’s depiction of its educated, powerful African-American heroine and the resolution of the conflict may be. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I Am Legend is the first novel in this collection so I will start with that. Vaguely similar to the Will Smith movie of the same name, our hero Robert Neville is the last surviving human uninfected by a vampirism plague which can turn the living and the dead. He spends his nights locked in the home he has converted into a fortress, drinking himself to oblivion and his days researching the disease, roaming the dead city, searching for supplies and killing all the vampires he can find. Utterly alone. Until the afternoon he sees a woman out walking in the sunlight. His abduction of her, a near-mindless nostrum for his loneliness, preciptates a series of events that will propel him out of his carefully crafted universe into legend.
The abrupt closure to I Am Legend is followed by Buried Talents, a short story set in a fairground game booth where you win prizes by tossing ping-pong balls into empty fishbowls. Or try; no one wins anything until a tall man in a wrinkled black suit puts his quarter on the counter. He doesn’t care about the prizes, but he doesn’t want to stop playing.
The Near Departed is a scant two pages. A mortician discusses funeral arrangements for the wife of an unnamed man. She is to have the best of everything, as she is young, beautiful, and everyone loves her. Her husband always gave her the best of everything and her funeral is to be no exception.
Prey is the first short story featuring traditional African religions. Amelia has come home from a shopping trip with a “genuine Zuni fetish doll” as a birthday present for her anthropologist boyfriend Arthur, whom she plans to see that evening. But when she calls her narcissistic mother to cancel their regular Friday night plans so she can spend Arthur’s birthday with him, the resulting guilt trip and silent treatment so upset her she cancels with Arthur as well and goes to take a bath, leaving the fetish unboxed and unattended on the living room end table. What she doesn’t know is that these fetishes must be handled very carefully. Her evening does not go as planned.
Witch War Seven pretty little girls are the weapons in this dark twist on traditional World War Two stories. The writing is more experimental and repetitive than the other stories, with Matheson playing up the apparent dichotomy of “pretty little girls” being the agents of destruction.
Dance of the Dead Another post war story, we follow four college students on a double date into the dangerous and alluring city of Saint Louis, to watch the Dance of the Dead.
Dress of White Silk appears to be an excerpt from the diary of a young girl who has been locked in her room, for what she does not know, by her grandmother. She is reminiscing over the events leading to her grounding and attempting to puzzle out, with her childish logic and grasp of grammar, where she has done wrong. But her conclusions and our conclusions are vastly different.
Mad House explores the idea that human emotions can imprint on the items around them, and the horrifying, violent results of their long term exposure to the rage of a man with anger management issues.
The Funeral is a darkly comic supernatural story where the owner of a funeral parlour finds an unexpected niche market giving the undead their dream send offs.
From Shadowed Places was probably my favourite story in this collection. A wealthy young trophy hunter named Peter Lang is gripped by a mysterious malady that is slowly killing him through sheer agony. It has no discernible physical source and modern Western medicine is powerless against it. When it is clear Lang is at death’s door his fiancée, Patricia Jennings, remembers an old school friend who teaches anthropology and spent a couple years in Africa. Dr. Lurice Howell is the powerful heroine I mentioned before, and it is her power and knowledge which will battle death for Peter.
Person to Person tells us of David Millman, plagued by an idiopathic ringing in his head that wakes him up each night at 3 am. No medicine he tries will alleviate it and allow him to sleep undisturbed, until one day the therapist he is seeing suggests David try answering the phone. That definitely sets things in motion, but not in the direction either of them are expecting. And Millman’s struggle for control of this bizarre affliction will close out not just the book, but his life as he knows it.
The Gods Above by Alex McGilvery
Tree Slices 