Stories that inspired the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery

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	• Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Vol. 3 (Richard Matheson: Collected Stories) Richard Matheson Gauntlet Press, 2005 - 349 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Stories - Poor Editing

I have read all three of the volumes in this collection. I must say that this collection is so poorly edited, that I find it impossible to believe that it was edited at all.

The excellence of Matheson's work has caused it to be melded into the very culture of America. Some of the stories here were adapted to serve as episodes of the television series, Amazing Stories, Night Gallery, and the Twilight Zone.

The poor editing of this collection, or, rather, the lack of editing, certainly does not pay a worthy tribute to such a great and culturally significant writer.

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One of the best short story writers ever

In the category of "All good things must come to an end" squarely fits the collection of Richard Matheson's short stories. As the first two volumes of the set aptly demonstrated, Matheson is a top-notch short story writer, although "was" might be more appropriate: he hasn't written a short story since the early 1970s. The third and final volume of Matheson's Collected Stories shows that he finished that phase of his career with a bang.

There are twenty-nine stories in this collection, too much to review each one individually. And while some are just okay, there are also some excellent ones. In fact, even if you've never read Matheson, you'll be familiar with some of the ones I'm referencing because of their adaptations for TV (particularly the Twilight Zone).

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" has been adapted at least twice (and parodied on the Simpsons). In it, a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown believes he seeing a being tampering with the wing of a plane while it is flying. Is it really there? Like many Matheson stories, what is reality and what is hallucination is sometimes hard to distinguish. And "First Anniversary" is a good example of Matheson horror, with a man looking sensitivity to his wife.

For pure horror, however, few stories in this set beat "Prey", the creepy tale of a woman trapped in her apartment with a Zuni warrior doll that has come to life and is intent on killing her. This was adapted for the 1970s TV movie "Trilogy of Terror" with Karen Black; the other two stories in that Trilogy are also in this volume: "The Likeness of Julie" and "Therese". The collection concludes with the final short story that Matheson wrote (although others would be published later), and it's a doozy: "Duel", the tale of a man driving from L.A. to San Francisco on back roads and being harassed by an ominous truck drive; the adaptation of this story would be one of the earliest works by a then-unknown Steven Spielberg.

Matheson may not be the most well-known writer, but he is one of the most influential (this volume contains praise by Stephen King, among others). Besides his short stories, he has done numerous screenplays (including many of Roger Corman's Poe movies) and such novels later adapted into movies as The Incredible Shrinking Man, Stir of Echoes, I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, Hell House and Somewhere in Time. For a sampling of his work, you can't go wrong with this volume of his short stories as well as its two predecessors.

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Stories that inspired the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery

This book is a compilation of Richard Matheson's last short stories. If you are a fan of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and/or Night Gallery, you will love this book. This is the best volume in the group. There are three volumes in the whole collection; I recommend buying all three at once so you won't have to wait for more when you finish this volume.

Short description

This is the third and last volume of Richard Matheson's short stories, all of which he wrote between 1950 and 1970. It contains an afterward by the son of the author as well as some other short texts about the author from other writers. Each story comes with a short note by the author.

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More Of My Favorite Stories

An astounding event occurred in September 1989-A signed and slipcased edition of Richard Matheson's collected stories was offered by Scream Press (called Dream Press for this limited edition of 1250 at Mr. Matheson's request). If you weren't lucky enough to snatch up a copy of that landmark volume, Gauntlet Press is giving us a second chance to own and read these marvels of short fiction. This third collection in the Gauntlet series boasts some of Mr. Matheson's most famous stories: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (remember hot young William Shatner freaking out on the classic Twilight Zone episode of the same name?) and "Prey" (Karen Black pursued by a vicious killer Zuni fetish doll in her apartment in Trilogy of Terror). Three of my personal favorites are also included: the hilarious "Tis the Season to be Jelly" (opening line: Pa's nose fell off at breakfast--and it just gets weirder and funnier from there), a truly mind-blowing take on date rape, "The Likeness of Julie", and the story I'm reminded of every summer's evening, "Crickets". These are daring and original stories that crack the roof off contemporary American mores, stories that stay with the reader for a lifetime. In addition to these splendid tales, you'll find a preface by Stanley Wiater, the original Dream Press introduction and the 2003 introduction by Gauntlet Press. Also included are heartfelt and insightful appreciations by such luminaries as Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison and Richard Christian Matheson.

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Here we have VOLUME THREE of our Edge Books imprint publication of RICHARD MATHESON: COLLECTED STORIES. Again, it is an expanded tradepaperback version of the 1989 Dream/Press hardcover limited edition. We are publishing it in 3 volumes (click here to view RICHARD MATHESON: COLLECTED STORIES, VOLUME ONE and VOLUME TWO).

This three volume edition of RICHARD MATHESON: COLLECTED STORIES is the gathering together of 86 Richard Matheson short stories, beginning with Born of Man and Woman from 1950 and ending with Duel from 1971. The stories were arranged by Matheson himself roughly in chronological order of original publication. There are also several tributes to Richard Matheson throughout the volumes from admirers such as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, William F. Nolan, and others. Finally, Matheson wrote a deeply revealing Introduction for the collection. As Matheson himself states in this Introduction, "A twenty-year period of creativity reduced to the psychological background of my output of fantasy and science-fiction stories. If this were a thesis, that would be my premise".

As with Volume One and Two, for Volume Three editor Stanley Wiater has included a "bibliophile" at the end of each story containing Matheson's very own commentary on the behind-the-scenes details of each story. Each story is also listed with it's original publication date and place of publication.

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