(In keeping with my book-vs.-film fascination, I read his novel A Stir Of Echoes three years ago out of curiosity, but put his What Dreams May Come down half-read the following year, and never went back. His short stories are often terrific–"Mad House" strikes me as particularly brilliant–but I tend to find his writing style blunt and simplistic, full of flat declarative sentences, unnuanced characters, and windy vapidity. It was simultaneously exciting, liberating, and kind of a "duh!" moment.Īnd looking back on it, it was also sort of ironic, because I eventually wound up discovering that I didn't actually like Matheson's authorial voice much.
For whatever reason, even though I was accustomed to working my way through entire library shelves of books in a series by, say, Beverly Cleary or Scott Corbett, and I understood that single authors sometimes produced many books about the same characters, it had never properly occurred to me that authors often have distinct authorial voices, and that if I liked the way a specific book read, I could go back to the same author for something in that same style. Some time later, I read another story of his, "Dress Of White Silk," and realized it was recognizably written in the same voice. In fifth grade, I ran across his classic short story "Born Of Man And Woman," and it gave me the serious chills. Richard Matheson has a mildly special place in my heart, as the writer who taught me that authorship matters.
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