Nightmare At 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories

Authors: Richard Matheson

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“The same is true in the horror genre, which is the literary equivalent of rock and roll-a quick hit to the head that bops your nerves and makes them hurt so good. Before Matheson came dozens, going back to the author of the Grendel story, and Mary Shelley, and Horace Walpole, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft, and… But like rock and roll, or any other genre that skates across the nerve-endings, horror must constantly regenerate and renew itself or die. In the early 19...50s, when Weird Tales was dying its slow death and Robert Bloch, horror's greatest writer at the time, had turned to psychological tales (and at this same time Fritz Leiber, easily Bloch's equal, had fallen oddly silent for a time) and the genre was languishing in the horse latitudes, Richard Matheson came life a bolt of pure ozone lightning. He single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps which were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories that were like shots of white lightning. What do I remember about those stories? I remember what they taught me; the same thing rock's most recent regenerator, Bruce Springsteen, articulates in one of his songs: No retreat, baby, no surrender.MoreLess Read More Read Less