(This post originally appeared in slightly different form on November 17, 2007.)
A while back I read and enjoyed Richard Matheson’s first suspense novel, SOMEONE IS BLEEDING, originally published by Lion Books in 1953. Now I’ve read his second novel, FURY ON SUNDAY, also published by Lion in 1953, and I liked it even better.
I have a fondness for books that take place in a short period of time. Everything in FURY ON SUNDAY happens during a four-hour span, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. The plot is pretty simple: crazed pianist Vincent Radin escapes from the insane asylum where he’s locked up and sets out to kill the two people who have most wronged him, his former manager and the man who wound up marrying the woman Vincent was in love with when he went mad. Matheson cuts back and forth relentlessly between this handful of characters, creating a very effective atmosphere of suspense. His prose is pared right down to the bone, as it needs to be in a book of this type where the pacing is so important. It works here, whereas I thought the writing was rushed and sketchy at times in SOMEONE IS BLEEDING.
This novel is rare in its original edition but easily available in the Forge Books omnibus NOIR. It’s well worth reading.
A while back when I watched the Will Smith movie version of I AM LEGEND and posted about it, several people recommended that I read Richard Matheson’s source novel, something that I’d been meaning to do. Well, now I have, and everybody was right: other than the fact that it’s also relentlessly depressing, it’s really different from the movie, and really good, too.
No need to go into the plot. Most of you already know it. Two things impressed me about the book. One is how well it works as both horror and well-thought-out science fiction. I’m sure there have been other novels that achieved such a mixture, but right off-hand, I can’t think of any that accomplished it as well. The other thing that stands out for me is the sheer readability of Matheson’s prose. I was sitting there reading along, and I suddenly realized that I’d read seventy or eighty pages in what seemed like no time at all. In these days when I have to slog through too many books where the writing just doesn’t compel me to go on, an experience like that is rare. I’m not enough of a technician to pinpoint exactly how a writer does that, either. A lot of hard work and a little magic, I suspect.
That's the original edition pictured above. I read the edition of the novel that was issued as a tie-in with the recent movie, and it’s a good deal because you get not only the novel but also ten of Matheson’s excellent short stories, ranging from the Fifties to the Eighties. Several of these I remember reading when they first came out, but I enjoyed reading them again. Among them is “Prey”, originally published in PLAYBOY, which was adapted into a TV-movie featuring Karen Black and a vicious little African doll with a knife. Like a lot of people who were around in the Seventies, I remember that movie very vividly, but I had forgotten that it was based on a Matheson story.
I suspect that most of you reading this have already read I AM LEGEND. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. A grim but excellent book.