Fiction Lite

           We are a culture of convenience, a generation so busy we‘ve created a new vocabulary out of shortening words for text messages, we only have 90 minutes to devote to our abs, and there’s even this crazy little thing called speed dating.  

            This fact of our fast paced world has got me to thinking, why can’t the short story then, the literary equivalent to fiction lite (see, it takes too long to even spell out “light,” so I shortened it), make a comeback?  Love reading but don’t have much time?  Read some short stories. 

            Short stories are hardly a new genre, some of the greatest authors- old and new- have cut their writing teeth on these small doses of fiction.  Poe, Twain, and Kipling are just a few well-known names to have mastered the art of short stories.  Modern writers have begun a renewed interest in the genre as well, with writers like Stephen King as their inspiration.  Which brings me to Richard Matheson. 

            Not a household name  per se, but Matheson, himself an inspiration to King, has written the full-length novels What Dreams May Come, I Am Legend, and A  Stir of Echoes, all of which went on to be made into films.  His short stories, on the other hand, were the basis for more than a few Twilight Zone episodes.  This gives a great insight into the type of fiction he wrote, and the timelessness of his tales.  Sure, the Twilight Zone is decades older than most of us, but we all recognize the name and are familiar with the show’s eerie overtones.  And it’s guaranteed to scare the crap out of you in thirty minutes or less.

            Matheson has a knack already for disarmingly succinct and blunt storytelling.    His words create an atmosphere of creepiness without overt blood and gore, psychological terror versus the shoot em up variety.  

            He often begins his short stories in the middle of the action, throwing his audience off balance from the start.  In Dress of White Silk, he becomes a young girl who speaks to us from a locked room, only offering us the fact that Granma has put her there because “she says its happened.”  Through this child’s voice, which is dead on by the way, we hear her story from her own perspective, and in four short pages, you come to realize how evil children can be. 

            The Dear Departed, not even two full pages, tells us without actually vocalizing it that one man has had it up to here with his lovely younger wife.  Matheson is genius in his way of making statements with what he chooses to not say but simply allude to. 

            If you prefer gratuitous violence with a Child’s Play theme, Prey will have you turning on lights and checking under the couch for weeks after you’ve put the book down.  Dance of the Dead, one of my favorite of Matheson’s short stories, transcends time by taking an ordinary plot – two teenage couples looking for some excitement on a Saturday night- and twists it into an ambiguous political and futuristic nightmare.  He leaves the important information out until the end, effectively knocking the reader on its ass by the last few paragraphs. And at a respectable length of seventeen pages, you don’t feel duped by the withholding.

            Though Matheson penned most of these in the fifties, they wear their age incredibly well.  They don’t date themselves by the overuse of period references, so the stories lose no relevance through time.  The fact that they were written some forty years ago actually gives them the tattered edges of respectability that modern authors can only wish for.  If you like horror and you like a great read, and if you’d like it all wrapped up in twenty pages or less, give Matheson a whirl, I promise you won’t be disappointed. 

            Pick up I Am Legend by Richard Matheson published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. with the collection of short stories included, and I dare you to try to put it down.  Check it out at tor.com or Amazon.com.