Richard Matheson, the prolific American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction, much of whose work has been adapted for TV and cinema, has died aged 87. Cited by Stephen King as the biggest influence on his own work, Matheson sent shivers down the spines of readers and viewers for decades, with such unusual novels and stories as The Incredible Shrinking Man and the much-filmed I Am Legend.
He turned his hand to pacy adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for the film director Roger Corman, to the story and screenplay for one ofSteven Spielberg's most effective films, Duel (1971), and 16 instalments of the popular and ingenious television series The Twilight Zone. For Matheson, horror was potentially everywhere: battlefields, suburban streets, a cellar, an aircraft cabin – even a library.
Matheson was born in Allendale, New Jersey, to Norwegian parents, and brought up in Brooklyn, New York. As a youngster he first set his heart on a musical career, but an avid appetite for fantasy sparked his imagination and fired his creativity: he was only eight when his stories appeared in a local newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle. He was transfixed by seeing Dracula at a local cinema and by his teens had the idea for the vampire story I Am Legend. After he graduated from Brooklyn technical high school in 1943, second world war service intervened.
He later described his experiences through the eyes of a common soldier in his acclaimed novel The Beardless Warriors (1960). A key scene catches the surprise and ambiguity that had become his trademark: "A little while ago, each side had done its lethal best to decimate the other. Now, the guns and cannons temporarily stilled, each carried off the victims of their contest. To Hackermeyer it was brutal ambiguity; the condition of war at its most unfathomable. He looked at the Germans with hostile eyes. Why were they doing this? Why had they come with a white flag and, in a polite conference, arranged to forestall the war until the battlefield was tidied?"
Solitary, bewildered men recur in Matheson's work, and he developed such trademark characters while working nights as a linotype operator in California. He had moved to the west coast after graduating in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1949. He met his future wife, Ruth Ann Woodson, on a beach in Santa Monica; they married in 1952.
A first novel, Hunger and Thirst, went unpublished for several decades. A short story, Born of Man and Woman (1950), attracted notice and became part of his first story collection, published in 1954, the same year that I Am Legend appeared. In this tale, the last man on Earth is beset by vampires. Partially soothed by whisky, music and the companionship of a dog, he reflects in a library on all the books on its well-stocked shelves, "the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing". It was filmed three times, as The Last Man on Earth (1964), as The Omega Man (1971) and, most recently, with Will Smith, as I Am Legend (2007).
Credits: guardian.co.uk
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