Richard Matheson: Past Masters

Yes, I know I should be indexing Richard Matheson on Screen, but when Matheson news this big hits, well, that’s like asking the tide not to come in—Gauntlet has at last unveiled Matheson Uncollected: Volume Two, and as usual, it’s a humdinger.  You won’t want to crack open the book, for fear of taking your eyes off the stunningly evocative jacket art by Harry O. Morris, whose recollections of working with the master on more than a dozen books we were proud to include in The Richard Matheson Companion, but if you don’t open it, you’ll be doing yourself a major disservice.  For Matheson completists, this is the big one, and although the book cries out for an introduction—say, by my friend and fellow Matheson scholar Paul Stuve, who helped put it together—to set some of its contents in context, I will try to pinch-hit for him by providing a preview, if not a review (since I won’t get to read it from cover to cover until mine is finished).

The idea behind Matheson Uncollected is identical to that of the equally invaluable The Beatles: Past Masters, which assembled songs that for whatever reasons did not appear on their formal albums, so that if you owned those plus the two volumes of Past Masters, you would have everything the Beatles issued commercially.  As if that weren’t enough, Gauntlet has characteristically gone the extra mile by including four previously unpublished items:  the newly rediscovered short story “An Element Never Forgets”; the unfinished novels Red Is the Color of Desire and The House of the Dead (an alternate version of which appears in the lettered edition); and Matheson’s unfilmed first-draft adaptation of his novel What Dreams May Come.  This screenplay was written in 1985 for Stephen Deutsch—producer of Somewhere in Time and, as Stephen Simon, the final script by Ron Bass—and director Wolfgang Petersen (see “Das Boot Camp”), here misspelled “Peterson.”

Among the previously published stories in Volume Two, mostly—as its title suggests—collected for the first time, are two each that made their debuts in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (“Leo Rising,” “CU: Mannix”) and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine (“Getting Together,” “Person to Person”).  For the record, Tor did include “Person to Person” (adapted in a YouTube video) as one of the bonus short stories in its 1995 edition of I Am Legend, apparently with little if any fanfare, but since the other contents of that collection are all readily available elsewhere, it makes sense for collectors to have this one, no?  Here, too, are “Mountains of the Mind” (Marvel Science Fiction, November 1951), inexplicably listed in the table of contents as an unfinished novel; “Now Die in It” (Mystery Tales, December 1958); and “Where There’s a Will,” an early collaboration with his son Richard Christian for Kirby McCauley’s 1980 anthology Dark Forces.

The pick of the litter, at least for completists, is “The Hunt,” which Paul recently excavated from a copy of the March 1952 issue of West magazine, and which not only has never been reprinted, but also appears in none of the standard Matheson bibliographies…including, I am sorry to say, the otherwise exhaustive list we had already compiled for the Companion and its revised edition, The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson.  The micro-short story “Portrait” comes complete with its accompanying illustration by Tenille Enger, and was written for Framed: A Gallery of Dark Delicacies, the 2003 anthology compiled by L.A. booksellers and Matheson über-boosters “Gomez and Morticia” (i.e., Del and Sue) Howison.  “Haircut” appeared in the 2006 Gauntlet collection Masques V, whose co-editor, Gary Braunbeck, also contributed a “Button, Button” sequel to Christopher Conlon’s award-winning tribute anthology He Is Legend.

Paul was kind enough to share some of the contents of Volume Two with me while it was being assembled, and although I had hoped to be in print first, so that I could crow about including hitherto unpublished material, I was able to mention several relevant items in my own book, such as the little-known fact that “Now Die in It” was later expanded into Matheson’s twice-adapted novel Ride the Nightmare.  Both “Mountains of the Mind” and “An Element Never Forgets” are among the group of loosely connected stories set at fictional Fort College, as is “Trespass” (aka “Mother by Protest”), the basis for his 1974 TV-movie The Stranger Within.  Matheson cannibalized The House of the Dead in his Pit and the Pendulum screenplay, since Poe’s story is unusually lacking in narrative structure; based on the four chapters here, there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between them, but unlike Red Is the Color of Desire, it does not include an outline of the rest.

Okay, time to grab some lunch (it being Sunday afternoon as I write this) and get back to work.

Bradley out.