The Funeral by Richard Matheson

I don't really know what I'm supposed to add to The Funeral.

It's a very funny story. The temptation to be the zillionth Seton Hill commentator to point out the parallels to the song "Monster Mash" is just too damned easy. There's a bunch of monsters gathered around for the 'funeral' of one of their own number, everything goes tits-up, the strangely nebbish and easily shocked funeral director watches everything go south and nearly goes insane, things eventually settle down once the combative witches stop trying to pick fights, the 'corpse' thanks him for the quality presentation of the funeral, and the story ends with the funeral director accepting a request from an Unspeakable Horror From Beyond The Stars to set up his/her/its/fhtagn funeral.

Kicking the tires and lifting the hood of the story, this story tells me three things. One, nobody does absurdist comedy-of-manners style comedy better than the British and this feels like a VERY British story. If I were to steal this riff, I'd watch a lot of Blackadder or A Little Bit of Fry and Laurie. Second, it's not that hard to defang classic monsters. We've all seen them a hundred times before and we've internalized the lyrics to the point where the song is way too familiar. Forget the whole "Twilight ruined vampires foreeeeever" malarkey. Matheson proved back in the '60s that this shit is played out. Third, there's a lot of mileage to be had in monster comedy. As much as it is a comedy of manners, it's also a high-octane cartoon. There's pratfalls and bright colorful characters and an atmosphere of loony, over the top menace. This would make a bomb-ass movie.

Anyway, yeah, it's a damned fine yarn. I like monsters, I like Matheson, I like funny. I don't....I don't really know what I can add beyond that.

I Am Legend

I started writing this drunk and finished it hung over. Welcome back, Seton Hill.

What am I talking about? Zombies? Vampires? A'ight.

So I was talking to one of my asshole hipster friends and we were lamenting the fact that nobody who is into pop culture seems to look at the roots of the things that they love. Nobody watches Casablanca or Citizen Kane or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Searchers unless they're forced to for film class.

Reading I Am Legend felt like going back to the roots of the whole zombie thing.



Okay, yeah, they're vampires. But the narrative is the same as a zombie story. Lone survivor, desperate circumstances, scrounging for what he needs to get by, and surviving on good old libertarian work ethics (he can maintain generators AND grow garlic AND fix cars AND fight monsters? Man, my ass would be dead in a minute.) Almost all zombie books are siege books and Robert Neville is clearly a man living under constant threat. The book opens with him checking the damage from the night before, repairing busted generator parts, and harvesting garlic from his greenhouse. We don't get the sense that the creatures hounding him are human, but Matheson is coy with the details. Rereading the book, I'm struck how Matheson did himself a disservice by sticking too close to the whole vampire thing. He seems like he's on the verge of creating a brand new monster, but he loses traction trying to fit all the classic vampire details into his narrative. When Romero took this story and made Night of the Living Dead, he was taking the story to the next natural level.

Where Matheson stumbles on the monsters, the construction of the story is brilliant. Zombie stories are actually really hard to pull off. They're siege stories, they're nihilistic, and they only end one of two ways: the heroes either find sanctuary or they get got. The situation isn't helped by the fact that modern creators have eschewed post-apocalyptic survivalist stories for rugged American high-octane machine gun power fantasies. The real threat in old school zombies stories isn't necessarily the zombies. The threat is the isolation, the paranoia, the inability to work together, and fact that our structures collapse in the face of the zombie threat.



Robert Neville is not necessarily an easy character to follow around. The isolation and constant threat has made him weird. He spends his days in a routine: fix, scrounge, and slay. He's tormented by the memory of his dead family, he's got weird sexual hang ups (shades of the dissatisfaction I felt reading Matheson's Hell House) and he's staying alive mostly out of habit. The narrative is fixed on his point of view and we feel trapped along with him. The first time he really opens up to us is when he tries to befriend and stray dog. Frankly, I think the story would have been better if it started with this interaction. It shows how far Neville has fallen from his humanity, especially when you stack it up with the more theatrical scenes of him beating his breast at his wife's grave.

The quibbles I have with the book are mostly minor. The dog scenes should have been first, the vampire stuff is ultimately superfluous, the "science" he comes up to explain the vampire condition is pretty half-baked and takes up too much time, and survival stories ultimately lose narrative flow in favor of the minutia of day-to-day getting by. But Matheson not only creates and nails the zombie genre, he proceeds to end the story in the only logical place it could go.



I keep harping on the idea that the reason zombie stories are unique among the horror genre is that most horror is about the monster invading the normal world. It causes damage, we defeat it, the status quo is saved. Zombie stories are about the monster becoming the status quo. Simply by surviving in our world, the remaining humans become the monsters. Monsterism, therefore, is simply a question of context. In the new world being build by the mutants, Neville is the monster. He's the wild-eyed beast slaying creatures in the daylight. He is a thing to be feared and destroyed. It's a much deeper idea than survival stories, and Matheson created it at the beginning of the modern zombie myth.

Hell House by Richard Matheson

While I was reading Hell House by Richard Matheson, I kept thinking to myself "Thank god I was born and raised in San Francisco after the sexual revolution."

Sex plays a HUGE part of this novel but it's the kind of sex horror writers from that era love to write about; 70 percent Penthouse Forum, 30 percent hand-wringing WASP-y sensibilities. Sexual repression runs rampant through the character's psyches and the evil spirits residing in the haunted house torment them with pornographic images, scenes of debauched orgies, and....gasp and shock and awe....a chapel with a crucifix equipped with a large erect penis. A woman has sex with a corpse (sorta) and is forced into having a lesbian encounter with the repressed young wife of the arrogant, impotent professor. The ghosts come from the Rob Zombie/Pazuzu dialogue school of Saying Really Foul Shit To Shock Conservative Sensibilities. I'm sure it was all terribly cage rattling to the sensibilities of some people, but to me the whole thing seemed juvenile.

I'm not scared of sex.



Okay, I'm scared of some of the real, practical stuff around sexuality that everyone is afraid of. Will I ever get laid again? Will I by any good at it? Will the person I get naked with take one look at my fat naked ass and laugh? But the novel seems to be written to rattle the cage of someone with a much more reserved outlook than my own. While I'm not the Marquis de Sade by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not rattled by most of the stuff on the page. I read my Dan Savage, I've lived in slutty cosmopolitan cities my whole life, I had my wild days, and I've walked through the Folsom Street Fair and "seen" (cough) more debauched shit than the book covers.

And all that stuff is done by normal people. Public sex, group sex, gay sex, all that stuff isn't done by depraved monsters rutting in the mud at the expense of their humanity. It's done by people. Ever notice how the most wild sex acts in horror fiction are always accompanied murder, as if the two things run hand in hand and it's a narrow line between murder and fucking? It's like the message is that really wild sex is always one-sided, predatory, and possessive, and there's little distinction between consensual wild rutting and cutting your partner's throat mid-coitus.

But, yeah, I'm not that repressed. I don't find sex particularly shocking or taboo-breaking, so when I read a description of a bunch of psychos fucking, all I can think is that the writer has issues and he assumes that I do too.

But then, that's just me.

Not to dog overmuch on Richard Matheson. I am a big fan. I've read a lot of his major work and a bunch of his stories and it's clear the debt that Stephen King owes to him. He's a great writer, Hell House was a very interesting and engaging book, but the view of sexuality at the core of the book didn't work for me. If the engine behind your horror story are taboos that the average slutty modern person doesn't share, you're gonna run out of steam early.

Reading the book, I couldn't help but think back to Clive Barker's work, particularly The Hellbound Heart. Barker has said that his work is meant to titillate as much as terrify and his stories are full of wild sexuality. But Barker doesn't approach the material the way most horror writers deal with sex. It's a part of his characters' experiences, not something to draw anxiety from. It feels more mature and in line with my sensibilities.



Oh, wait, in all this hot nonsense, I didn't actually synopsize the story.

Hell House tells the story of four paranormal investigators hired by a rich man to investigate the Belasco house, a haunted house of such dreadful malevolence that several previous investigative attempts have ended in tragedy. The noble group includes a beautiful clairvoyant with a new-agey take on Christian ideals, a polio-addled scientist and his significantly younger wife, and a previous survivor of one of the doomed earlier investigations. Each of them brings their own interpretation of the hauntings in the house and their safety and sanity is tested by the vicious spirit at the center of the house, a hedonistic deviant with a messianic complex.

It's impossible to ignore the obvious debt that this story owes to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which also has a group of deeply conflicted individuals trying to puzzle out a rational explanation to the supernatural events that surround them, but Matheson did a great job drawing out these characters. It's a hoary old truism that the best haunted house stories feature characters whose internal traumas power and fuel the hauntings, but the characters in Hell House are really engaging.

Florence, the former actress turned spiritual leader, is usually the sort of character I have a difficult time getting behind. She's essentially, in her own compassionate and gentle way, a religious fanatic of sorts. There's something slightly arrogant about her demeanor; she knows exactly what's going on in the house and the best way to combat it, and her unwillingness to critically examine her surroundings leads to her destruction. She's essentially the house's patsy and she completely buys the con game the house sells her. Yet despite all my complaints about her gullibility, I found myself admiring her courage and selflessness. She enters the house and reaches out to the spirits because she actually wants to help them, and she risks herself time and again to reach out to the "spirit" of the house's owner's son. For all her good intentions, her story ends in the most harsh way imaginable. Her eventual fate genuinely squicked me out, particularly due to the sexualized elements of it, but I got behind her and I found her heroic.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, representing the calm rational world of science is Dr. Lionel Barrett. Unlike many science characters in these sorts of tales, he's not there to scoff rudely at evidence of the supernatural. He's a parapsychologist, but he's view of the source of the energy is refreshingly interesting. I liked his take on the occult and his fancy machine, which he believed would dissipate the energy in Hell House. I also liked his relationship with his wife. It was tender and affectionate, if sexless. One of my complaints on the story is that I felt Matheson doesn't set up the Barrett's bedroom woes early enough, but they work as an engaging and supportive couple. It's got a weird father/daughter dynamic going on and Edith is probably a big ol' confused closet case, but I felt they were portrayed realistically.

The other two characters, Ben Fischer and Edith Barrett, are well-defined and engaging. The shell-shocked man who survived a previous attack on the house and the neurotic wife of the doctor are heroic when needed, weak when called to be, and keep the tale humming along. They're good. Go read the book if you want to learn more.

One of my favorite aspect of the book is how well flushed-out the spirit haunting the house is. Most haunting stories are amorphous entities with ill-defined abilities and agendas. They exist to provide the creak in the floor, the rattling chains, and the whispered threat. Matheson paints Belasco in very specific strokes, with a very specific endgame and weaknesses to be exploited. He's very much a character in the story, at once powerful and ruined by his own egotism. In general, I like ambiguity and mystery, but I liked that Hell House represented a very clear antagonist with a very specific goal in messing with the heroes.



Hell House is a classic of horror literature. It's built like a Swiss pocket watch in its taut precision and was engaging on a craft and characterization level alone. The primary tools of horror the book used to rattle my cage leaned too much toward a melodramatic sexuality, which felt childish. Still, the book was definitely interesting and engaging. I'd recommend it to people who like solid haunted house stories.