Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of Irish Halloween Terror, ‘Banshee’

“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

“It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if it died in the night, no one would know.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “Banshee,” originally published in Gallery, September 1984 issue, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

I suspect that my readers will want to explore the rest of this story, based simply on this ominous opening by Ray Bradbury. But I came to the tale by a different route: from watching a few years ago a nearly 40-year-old adaptation on the cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater.

As I noted in this blog post from August 2020, it struck me that the plot of the story—a meeting over a potential project between a meek screenwriter and a veteran Hollywood director—reenacted, in a fictional setting, the rocky collaboration between Bradbury and Hollywood legend John Huston over the 1956 adventure movie Moby-Dick. 

While preparing a recent talk on Huston, his daughter Anjelica and father Walter, I was struck anew by how this tale of Hibernian horror provided unexpected insights into his complex personality.

Bradbury came from America in 1953 to meet with Huston—first in London, then Dublin, and finally the Georgian manor outside the Irish capital that the director was renting.

Late in life, Huston complained that his reputation for sadistic dealings with film personnel stemmed from a single figure: Freud leading man Montgomery Clift, who, in this telling, had presumed on his host’s tolerance by engaging in a late-night encounter with another male guest at his Irish home.

Huston was gilding the lily, however. At least two other people who worked with him accused him of the same misbehavior, albeit under different circumstances.

Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edna O’Brien declined to speak to Huston biographer Jeffrey Meyers in significant detail about their work adapting A.E. Ellis’ novel The Rack. 

But a few years later, in her 2014 memoir Country Girl, she was more open, accusing Huston of insulting her screenplay as “half-baked rubbish” after praising it earlier in their discussions. Following a crying fit, she blurted out to Anjelica Huston that her father was “a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man,” according to the actress’s A Story Lately Told.

O’Brien’s anger was so pronounced that she felt the need to vent twice in print. 

The first time was expressed more obliquely, in the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides. Alluding several times to James Joyce’s novella “The Dead,” which Huston adapted into his final feature film, O’Brien depicted him as a dinner party latecomer called “Reggie,” “obviously a man of note” with “something of the quality of a panther.” 

For all his charm and attractiveness there is something ruthless about him, conveyed nowhere more devastatingly than when the female protagonist, “Miss Lawless,” discovers that he has been “chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave.”

That same callousness towards ex-lovers and prospective new ones becomes the principal count in Bradbury’s indictment of “John Hudson.” The author hinted far more bluntly than O’Brien had about the source of the character. 

Not only do the transparently “fictional” and real-life characters have similar-sounding surnames, but each is working on a film where the hero is “plowing the sea,” with wife and children off in a foreign land during the screenwriter’s visit. Even the locale of the meeting, “Courtown,” is the name of Huston’s home at the time.

The story is not merely “autofiction”—a genre in which the author and the protagonist are deeply similar but not identical—but more like an autofictional revenge story.

Bradbury, still smarting three decades later over Huston’s condescension and practical jokes at his expense, gave the director’s fictional counterpart a grisly end delivered, appropriately enough, by a ghost of one of the many women he seduced and dumped. 

(A “banshee,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is, according to Irish folklore, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death.)

Ray Bradbury Theater lasted six seasons; this adaptation was the season one finale, indicating how close the author felt to this material.

Ironically, the TV version of “Banshee” starred Peter O’Toole, who had visited Huston’s estate when they both resided in Ireland’s County Galway. 

I’m not sure if Huston even heard about the episode in the year and a half between its airing and his death; his emphysema had grown so bad that he needed to be connected to an oxygen tank, so he might have been beyond caring about his portrayal by then. 

In contrast, Bradbury continued to care very much. Like O’Brien, his disenchantment with his former cinematic hero remained so intense that he needed to exorcise it a second time.

The title of his 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, echoes another roman a clef about a thirtysomething screenwriter’s creative tension with a director closely modeled on Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart.

(Jennifer Dale, pictured here, played the troubled, wailing supernatural spirit in "Banshee," while Charles Martin Smith was Bradbury's alter ego, the young, much-put-upon screenwriter Doug.)

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on ‘The Evil That Men Do’)

“I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.”—American horror-fiction writer Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot (1975)

Evil can live on in politics, as well as among the undead.

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Offering the First Glimpse of Her Monster)

“Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.

“About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice.” — English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture on Frankenstein that highlighted the opening section of the novel, from which this passage is taken—a set of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister. His epic ambition—to discover the North Pole, in an age when ice and extreme cold posed mortal danger—anticipates that of Victor Frankenstein, a nearly frozen scientist he picks up in these barren arctic wastes.

In the grip of “the dark tyranny of despair,” Frankenstein warns against this quest for the glory accruing to scientific discovery: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”

The “shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” is the rejected creation who has brought Frankenstein untold misery. The glimpse that Walton’s crew has of him here is elusive, to be filled in by the extended account that Frankenstein is about to offer the explorer.

Walton’s “frame story” (or, to use a term from one of my college English classes some years ago about Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw,” an “envelope story”) was not included in the classic 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite its many faults, the 1994 remake (from which the accompanying image was taken), starring Robert DeNiro as the Creature and Kenneth Branagh as Victor, did include this narrative device.

It will be interesting to see if Guillermo del Toro’s version (in limited release next week) will do likewise. I hope so, because it reinforces a lesson relevant to our time: that heedless pursuit of scientific knowledge might produce unexpected and unwelcome consequences.

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Fraudulent Medium)

“[T]he individual who was repairing the tattered flag, turned round, perceived me, and showed me a countenance which could belong only to an ‘infallible waking medium.’ It was not, indeed, that Professor Fargo had the abstracted and emaciated aspect which tradition attributes to prophets and visionaries. On the contrary, the fleshly element in his composition seemed, superficially, to enjoy a luxurious preponderance over the spiritual. He was tall and corpulent, and wore an air of aggressive robustness. A mass of reddish hair was tossed back from his forehead in a leonine fashion, and a lustrous auburn beard diffused itself complacently over an expansive but by no means immaculate shirt front. He was dressed in a black evening suit, of a tarnished elegance, and it was in keeping with the festal pattern of his garments, that on the right forefinger of a large, fat hand, he should wear an immense turquoise ring. His intimate connection with the conjuring class was stamped upon his whole person; but to a superficial glance he might have seemed a representative of its grosser accomplishments. You could have fancied him, in spangled fleshings, looking down the lion's mouth, or cracking the ringmaster's whip at the circus, while Mlle. Josephine jumped through the hoops. It was his eyes, when you fairly met them, that proved him an artist on a higher line. They were eyes which had peeped into stranger places than even lions' mouths. Their pretension, I know, was to pierce the veil of futurity; but if this was founded, I could only say that the vision of Ezekiel and Jeremiah was but another name for consummate Yankee shrewdness. They were, in a single word, the most impudent pair of eyes I ever beheld, and it was the especial sign of their impudence that they seemed somehow to undertake to persuade you of the disinterested benevolence.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist Henry James (1843-1916), “Professor Fargo,” originally printed in Galaxy, August 1874, reprinted in Complete Stories, 1874-1884 (1999)

Though Henry James’ most famous short story might be “Turn of the Screw,” he wrote approximately two dozen tales of the supernatural that gave critical cachet to a genre that could use some at the time.

One of his earliest stories in this vein, “Professor Fargo,” featured more than just characters whose consciousness is profoundly disrupted by horrifying people, events or phenomena. It also involved contention for an innocent soul, and added a theme would preoccupy him for the of rest of his life: the pernicious effect of those who pursue wealth without scruples.

Together with Colonel Gifford, a down-on-his luck inventor now forced into billing as “The Great Mathematical Magician and Lightning Calculator,” Professor Fargo exploits the credulity of the grieving by promising to bring their loved ones back from the afterlife.  

Their “connection,” Gifford confides to the tale’s narrator, implies “no intellectual approval of his [Fargo’s] extraordinary pretensions.” But Gifford becomes even more alarmed by his partner’s growing influence over the colonel’s deaf-and-dumb teenage daughter.

When Gifford vents his disgust, Fargo proposes another “exhibit”: "Allow me to exhibit your daughter for a month, in my own way and according to my own notions, and I assume your debt."

Miss Gifford responds instantly to Fargo’s glance of command: “The poor child fixed her charming eyes on his gross, flushed face, and awaited his commands. She was fascinated; she had no will of her own.”

I don’t know where James came up with the idea for this haunting short story, but he seems to have been fascinated for a long time afterward by the instinct underlying stage hypnosis. After attending a lecture by his friend George du Maurier, he confessed his fascination with mass audiences’ susceptibility to sensation and sound, “the many-headed monster…, mak[ing] the mass (as we know the mass), to vibrate.”

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Halloween Horror Treat: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’

“The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1st Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to 'follow my leader' across that legendary spot.”—Scottish fiction writer, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “Thrawn Janet,” in The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Charles Neider (1969)

Some readers are likely to have encountered Robert Louis Stevenson in their childhood, as a poet. Far more people will experience him secondhand, through the many Hollywood adaptations over the years of his adventure novels like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.

But I was delighted to find, in adulthood, that he was also a master of short fiction, especially in the horror genre. I blogged previously on “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Body Snatcher.” Equally remarkable in its way is a story I discovered only recently, “Thrawn Janet.”

The quote leading off this post also begins Stevenson’s tale. In its tense sense of atmosphere, it is as powerfully foreboding as anything to be found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

It is also, in a sense, a trick—written, unlike the rest of the story, written in conventional English. But the atmosphere of evil is so densely concentrated that readers are dying to know what will occur next.

For the majority of readers unfamiliar with Scottish dialect, much of the ensuing tale requires patient, intense concentration. Some translations exist, but I read it slowly—an experience that reminded me of encountering Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s original Middle English. But dispensing with a translation can be done and is worth the effort.

The unfamiliar verbiage in this short story starts with the first word of the title, a strong but necessary hint about the nature of this tale. “Thrawn” is Scottish for “twisted,” indicating the sinister force in this story.

Just as Stevenson produces a change in narrative direction after the opening, he also effects a change—a “twist,” if you will—in characterization and voice.

The Rev. Soulis, who sounds initially like a Scottish fire-and-brimstone counterpart to one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan divines, was, we learn shortly, a rationalist of Enlightenment bent in his younger days, disbelieving the belief of his congregants that the woman he wants to hire as his housekeeper, Janet, could be a witch.

Horror is about altered mental states after an encounter with the inexplicable. By this standard, the horror of “Thrawn Janet” lies less in Satanic possession of Janet than in the haunted, demon-obsessed minister that Rev. Soulis becomes through his encounter with her.

The image accompanying this post, illustrating Stevenson’s story, is an 1899 etching by the Scottish painter and printmaker William Strang (1859-1921). 

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on Horror Tales and Morality)

“Within the framework of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile.” —Novelist Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1981)

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, on a Jesting Dwarf’s Revenge on a Sadistic Leader)

[Hop-Frog the dwarf-jester said to the king]: “ ‘Just after your majesty, had struck the girl and thrown the wine in her face…there came into my mind a capital diversion—one of my own country frolics—often enacted among us, at our masquerades: but here it will be new altogether….I will equip you as ourang-outangs…. The resemblance shall be so striking, that the company of masqueraders will take you [the king and his seven advisers] for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished…’.

“And now, while the whole assembly (the apes included) were convulsed with laughter, the jester suddenly uttered a shrill whistle; when the chain flew violently up for about thirty feet— dragging with it the dismayed and struggling ourang-outangs, and leaving them suspended in mid-air between the sky-light and the floor….

" ‘Ah, ha!’; said at length the infuriated jester. ‘Ah, ha! I begin to see who these people are now!’ Here, pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below, horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest assistance….

“The dwarf seized his opportunity, and once more spoke:

“ ‘I now see distinctly,’ he said, ‘what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors,—a king who does not scruple to strike a defenseless girl and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester--and this is my last jest.’

“Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.”—American short-story writer, poet, and essayist Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “Hop-Frog” (1849)

Years ago, I read numerous tales by Edgar Allan Poe for my high school and college English classes. But I had never focused on this late story until I read an essay on the horror and suspense maven in Neil Gaiman’s nonfiction collection, The View From the Cheap Seats (2016)

Gaiman hailed this story’s “terrible and appropriate cruelty,” and it has taken on other implications than those suggested when it first appeared in print. (Some critics believed at the time that this was Poe’s vicarious vengeance on those who questioned his courtship of a couple of women; others thought it arose from the revolts that had occurred in several European countries in 1848.)

Contemporary readers might point to other elements of the central characterization here: a leader who is caustic, abusive towards women, and mocking the disabled, who at length goes too far, triggering a spontaneous retaliation against himself and his corrupt toadies.

A chain, once used to facilitate oppression, becomes a means of liberation. The king’s counselors, who enable his sadism and abuses of power by cheering him on, share in his downfall.

Their fate also mirrors their relationship to the king and to each other while they were alive: “a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass”—a warning that retribution, though coming late to men who exploit the marginalized and defenseless and to the circle that excuses these crimes, will surely arrive nonetheless.

Quote of the Day (Roald Dahl, on the Presence of a Ghost)

“The best ghost stories don’t have ghosts in them. At least you don’t see the ghost. Instead you see only the result of his actions. Occasionally you can feel it brushing past you, or you are made aware of its presence by subtle means… If a story does permit a ghost to be seen, then he doesn’t look like one. He looks like an ordinary person.”— British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot Roald Dahl (1916-1990), introduction to Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (1983)

(The image accompanying this post shows Claire Bloom and Julie Harris in the Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s chilling novel The Haunting of Hill House. Believe me, the atmosphere of this movie is about as far as you can get from the one Wise would make only two years later, the box-office smash The Sound of Music.)

Halloween Horror Appreciation: ‘I Am Legend,’ by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend was, of course, not the first vampire novel, nor even the first popular entertainment revolving around those other undead creatures, the zombies.

But the publication of the novel by Richard Matheson in 1954 catalyzed fears of an apocalypse gathering force in that early nuclear period. It told readers they were right to be afraid, because monsters were right outside their door. 

The premise of I Am Legend is fiendishly clever: the last man on Earth holding out against vampiredom. But the source of the horror is not a Dracula-like single powerful figure, but a horde of them, as much victims themselves as victimizers. Bacteria spread in the fallout of a cataclysmic war has led to a plague, and, consequently, a need for blood. 

It’s possible, then, to read this as a dystopian horror tale, as if George Orwell had written a horror tale. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, Matheson’s Robert Neville becomes a rebel against the established order; and, feeling terribly alone, he latches onto someone who is seemingly like himself, a secret sharer—as Smith did to Julia and O’Brien in 1984. 

Even while it brought apocalyptic themes to vampire fiction, Matheson’s creatures bear more than a little resemblance to the zombies that populate George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead as well as the current TV series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. He is, then, a huge part of the American cultural landscape, even if many viewers are unfamiliar with his name.

Though set in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly 20 to 25 years after its composition, the novel alludes to the by-now-distant American past. One of the avenues named here is “Cimarron Street,” as if Southern California is reverting to its Wild West origins—one that is, literally in this case, survival of the fittest.

Matheson masterfully sets the scene in the first half of the book, revealing Neville’s all-too-necessary self-sufficiency (he makes stakes and boards up his house every night, but must take extra care with his teeth, as there are no more dentists) and loneliness (he not only mourns the death of his wife and daughter, but has taken to drink to blot out the memory of killing his wife to keep her from turning into one of the undead). Likewise, Matheson sympathetically depicts Neville’s attempt to befriend and save a stray dog. 

However, the novel weakens when Neville encounters a female for the first time in three years. I suppose that loneliness and the physical need for a woman are enough to make him put aside his normal suspicions, but a reader can guess where this is leading in no time. (I found it in interesting that this woman, Ruth, bears the same name as Matheson’s wife!) 

Moreover, Neville’s attempt to explain the scientific sources of the horror besieging him inevitably slow down the narrative, even as it thrusts horror fiction in a new direction.

Still, Matheson’s style is lean and athletic without being schlocky, and he thinks through how the quotidian nature of human life is thoroughly upended by these apocalyptic events. And in Neville, he has created an all-too-human character—not a superhero, nor even a scientist, but an ordinary man afflicted with anguish and remorse even as he comes face to face with the existential nature of the horror that confronts him daily (“How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough”).

One of the novel’s late, indelible scenes finds Neville in a library, alone, reading up on the biological disaster that gave rise to the howling beasts who constantly scream for his blood. Matheson pays tribute here to literature, the ultimate—and precarious—zenith of civilization: 

“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, 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.”

Few greater tributes to his work were offered than by Stephen King, who cited him as the great influence on his own work. That tip of the hat is especially noteworthy when one considers that Matheson (who died in 2013) was part of a celebrated group of midcentury fiction and screenwriters who made a wide impact on horror and science fiction, including Robert Bloch (Psycho), Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison.

It was a golden age made possible by two divergent but welcoming media—pulp magazines and network TV—and Matheson made his mark with sharp-eyed observations on the sterility of midcentury American culture and the fragility of human life in the atomic age, through teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Night Stalker, and Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie thriller, Duel, as well as short stories such as “The Creeping Terror,” a biting satire on the spread of the culture of his state, California, around the country. 

Originally, I bought I Am Legend over a decade ago, in anticipation of the Will Smith adaptation about to be released. Partly because of poor reviews, I never got around to seeing the movie, nor the prior version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth, released in 1971. 

Perhaps it’s just as well: for all his own skill in writing for the large and small screen, Matheson allowed readers like me, through the magic of his own words rather than images, to create horror in their own imaginations.