Works (Buried Talents / Dance of the Dead / Dress of White Silk / From Shadowed Places / I Am Legend / Mad House / Person to Person / Prey / The Funeral / The Near Departed / Witch War)
1970
- occult
- american horror tales
- vampires
- epidemics
- horror
- fiction
- science fiction
- horror fiction
- horror tales
- short stories
The story
Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone. An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him. By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.... *From the publisher*
What it’s like
Sun-bleached and claustrophobic, this collection of Richard Matheson's stories carries the flat, washed-out dread of a deserted American town in the afternoon: dusty suburban streets, boarded windows, long empty stretches of quiet broken by sudden violence. Matheson's prose is lean and matter-of-fact, plain sentences that move briskly and let the strangeness sit in ordinary domestic settings, a kitchen, a parked car, a barricaded bedroom at night, where the horror is quietly accumulating. The emotional register runs from bleak isolation to grim, rueful irony, with lonely protagonists who are slowly undone by fear, grief and the weight of being the last ones left. Pacing is brisk and compact, with stories that end on a jolt. Violence is present throughout and can be sudden and bloody, with vampire attacks, killings and some gore described plainly rather than lingered over; sexual content is limited and not graphic, and the dread is more persistent than gruesome. It suits a late-night read alone with the lights on, or a cold, grey afternoon, and is for readers who want unsentimental, tightly built horror with a melancholic edge and no interest in comfort.
More books like Works (Buried Talents / Dance of the Dead / Dress of White Silk / From Shadowed Places / I Am Legend / Mad House / Person to Person / Prey / The Funeral / The Near Departed / Witch War)
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