Matheson mines our daily horrors

Button, Button

Uncanny Stories

Richard Matheson

Tor Books: 208 pp., $12.95 paper

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Had he not cemented his cinematic rep with Richard Matheson's horror story "Duel," Steven Spielberg might still be struggling in television. Had George A. Romero not openly pilfered from Matheson's novel "I Am Legend," the flinty fount of zombie flicks might not have struck. And had not Stephen King studied Matheson's tales for their focus on attention to American fears, he might not have become a mass-market juggernaut.

Yet Matheson's influence remains somewhat understated. It's almost as if he's the second-string quarterback called up only when Ray Bradbury can't carry a second-half drive.

Perhaps this is because Matheson's concise stories, like the dozen in the new collection "Button, Button: Uncanny Stories," read less like fantasy and more like domestic tales from the glory days of Collier's Weekly. "Dying Room Only" features a couple making a pit stop for lunch at a desert cafe. The husband disappears into a washroom and the wife accuses the regulars of kidnapping her man. In the pitch-perfect title story, another couple is torn apart by an outsider's unexpected offer: Push a button and collect $50,000, but at the cost of another person dying.

Matheson has a talent for sustaining tension through proximity. In "Button, Button," a woman glares "at the carton as she unlocked the door" and a man reaches "into an inside coat pocket" to withdraw "a small sealed envelope." In "Shock Wave," a character's fingers "lay tensely on the table." His almost theatrical concern for where his characters are situated and where objects are located may explain why so many of his stories have been adapted for film and television.

He also builds narrative momentum with nouns and adjectives. In "Mute," a home-schooled child who has been trained not to speak has survived a fire. His parents have died, and as the boy tries to blend into society, Matheson describes the boy's predicament: "Words. Empty, with no power to convey the moist, warm feel of earth."