Stories without method: Richard Matheson, three millimeters per day of fear

Let's start again from Stephen King. Indeed, by one of the most important writers for Uncle, that is Richard Matheson. And, in particular, from one of his most famous and luckiest novels: Three millimeters per day. But before getting there, and getting to the story of its protagonist, who is called Scott Carey and who, as the book's title indicates, becomes smaller by three millimeters every day, it is necessary to make a premise: Richard Matheson was one of the writers who had a more profound influence on the imagination of the second half of the 1900s.

He was a great craftsman, a tireless creator of stories that came together in his books, in films for cinema or in TV series - and what TV series - he worked on. Fragments of his imagination have exploded and scattered in every direction, leaving lasting traces in other authors and, whether we notice it or not, in our perception of the world.

The horror of everyday life

How did you do it? As often happens, in a very simple way: it took the horror and turned it into something everyday. Or rather, it took our daily fears and brought them to their extreme consequences, showing us how our everyday life, the things that surround us, the thoughts that buzz in our heads before falling asleep, or when we wake up to a start during the night, or even those who take possession of our waking state while we are behind the wheel or in line in the supermarket, are potentially hovering on the edge of the abyss.

In this way, Richard Matheson has become one of the authors decisive in the affirmation of an imaginary in which the fantastic, the horrific and the everyday are closely intertwined . Matheson, in other words, it was one of the writers and of the writers the most important of the TWENTIETH century, recognized as such by many authors as important as this, from Ray Bradbury and Stephen King , to get to Neil Gaiman and Anne Rice .

But before you get to Three millimeters per day , we start from a premise and ask ourselves: what kind of writer was Richard Matheson?

To answer, I thought of starting from a review written in 2013 – the year of the death of Matheson – the great Valerio Evengelisti . It is a piece titled The art of conciseness, and thus began:

“Richard Matheson made his debut in 1950 on The magazine The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with a story destined to remain impressed in the mind of one who reads: Born of man and woman. The inspiration is obvious: in practice, it is the remake of a tale of Lovecraft (1921), The stranger (Matheson will then operate other rewritings: in his novel The house of hell, 1971, draws very near from The house invaded by Shirley Jackson).

what distinguishes Born of man and woman from a template so illustrious? It is not difficult to find out. The story of a boy, the bearer of a monstrosity unknown to the reader) so frightening to terrorize his parents, was inserted by Lovecraft in a context that is typically gothic: a castle with towers, the corridors endless and ali uninhabited. Could bottom quite natural, in this environment, the presence of a monster. The effect of “horror” was entrusted only to the fact that the precise nature of that monstrosity you didn't know anything. In Matheson, the setting of the gothic disappears. Rising to the foreground the emotional states of the characters, not dispersed by the frame. The first sentence is one of those that upset: ‘Today, my mom called me a monster. The comparison will sound invasive at the academy, but think of Kafka and his Gregor Samsa. The rest of the story (only four pages), however, is not kafkaesque. Takes you directly to the throat, and drags the reader into a vortex of anguish. The fact is that it is alienating. Far: it concerns real emotions, that it is impossible not to share in the fund. And, the more you share, the more he is dragged into a pit where they cannot see the end.”

‘ real Emotions ’: from the beginning this is the gear that makes the work the work of Matheson. And it will run well enough to make it in a few years, one of the authors of the key of the post-war period .

The great stories of Matheson

As we said, Matheson has had a profound influence on the authors active from the ‘60s onwards, thanks to some basic works and yet well-known to the general public.

In 1954, in fact, publishes a novel destined to end up on the screen four times, based on an idea that came at the same Matheson when she was seventeen years old and was watching Dracula. We are talking about I am legend .

Then, in 1956, the public right to Three millimeters per day , that will become almost immediately a cult film, and, in 1958, I am Hellen Driscoll . Most of the authors are enough of these titles to get into the story, but Matheson is just the beginning.

After the success of the early years, began to collaborate with the cinema and the tv. Alfred Hitchcock to ask him to work on the screenplay for The birds , but his idea of never show, the birds did not like the british director, who replaced him with Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain. In the same years, however, begins to write a few episodes of one of the most important in the history of tv, that is, To the borders of reality .

Matheson became one of the main proponents of the success of the cult series, that will take the mystery and the horror in the homes of americans and the rest of the world, often making lever on the everyday horror and more common. So how it will happen, years later, in Duel , the first feature film by Steven Spielberg, inspired by a short story of Matheson is also the author of the subject and the screenplay of the film.

After you have worked and have made the history of television with The borders of reality , the american author works to other series of extraordinary success such as Alfred Hitchcock presents and Star Trek , impressing even more at the bottom of the sign in the medium, the most popular of the TWENTIETH century.

in Short, it is clear at this point that the imagery produced by Matheson in more than half a century of work has laid the foundation for the diffusion and the affirmation of the narrative of the genre – even horror – in literature, tv and cinema. As he wrote yet Valerio Evangelisti,

“We are, therefore, facing a true virtuoso of the art of storytelling, capable of raids media as required by the modern imagination, but to bring everything back to literature, that is, in the form of a story more ancient and established; unless, then, to enrich the latter of the vision and the technique that other media have their own domain privileged”.

One of the most curious of his first two novels, is that Matheson, at a certain point of his career, as it also tells the King in Danse Macabre , he saw them as distant objects, different from what it had become in the course of time. He found them to be interesting, but not exceptional. However, as the evidence of their success for almost seventy years, are two masterpieces.

Three millimeters per day, the masterpiece of Matheson

And so we arrive at Three millimeters per day . Because it would be a masterpiece? Because there, in that priming a narrative so simple, and in the processing that has been able to give Matheson the story, there is a veritable explosion of modern, and indeed contemporary, in which the infinitely small and the infinitely large of our psyche revealed by contemporary psychology come together and explode.

Scott Carey is exposed to a radioactive cloud, i.e. the form of energy that has terrorized – and continue to terrorizzarci – from the postwar period to today. Everyday stuff, then, although enormous, mysterious, unknown to us mere mortals.

However, it seems to be all worked out, but at a certain point, Scott realizes that his body becomes every day more small three millimeters. That there are few, very few, a pittance, at least in the beginning. But all trifles, if neglected, can turn into a catastrophe. We know this well, indeed very well: it happens every day, for a variety of reasons.

Then, to what fate he condemned our anti-hero? With a true stroke of genius for the craft, Matheson ec, reveals immediately why he decided to mount his story on two temporal planes are very distinct: the beginning of the story and the end . Indeed, almost the end.

In other words, we see, on the one hand, and out of Richard – who becomes the small, smaller, and physically powerless compared to his wife, who certainly cannot have sex with a man as tall as a child that can hold on your lap – and on the other the enormity of the world that surrounds him when he is a few inches high and the spider that lives in the cellar in which a refugee is a monster ready to devour him. We know how it all started and that infernal life is destined to end. And we want to know.

Know what happened in the middle, if it succeed, as he has to cope with the transition from the power of a healthy adult, to discouragement, to depression, to the eventual resignation. All things that happen, frighten us, and often we terrorize. All things that affect our adult life stunned of the face of the disease, ageing, death and the progressive and inexorable shrinking of our faculties: there inarchiamo, we become more low, we are less, the forces leave us and the world accelerates, becomes enormous, incomprehensible, mysterious. The story of Scott Carey, as we progress in the reading, it takes the light to the left of a warning: maybe we are him. Indeed, we are him.

so What happens in the novel? As if the cave Scott? You must read the novel to Matheson and find out. As he says of his uncle King

“Is part of the few books that I recommend to people, envying them the experience of first reading”.

If you want to discover the fiction of Richard Matheson, we recommend the reading of Three millimeters per day,