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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-06-24 10:02 pm

Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Tor.com is saddened and staggered to learn of the passing of Richard Matheson, the esteemed author of I am Legend, The Shrinking Man, What Dreams May Come, Hell House, the script for the Steven Spielberg film Duel, and many Twilight Zone scripts, among many more works.

[identity profile] doc-lemming.livejournal.com 2013-06-25 01:56 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm very sorry and saddened to hear of this. His I Am Legend was a huge effect on me (though I still haven't seen The Last Man On Earth). Between that and Some Of Your Blood, I was marked for life. Hell House was also formative.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King mentioned (not by name) a writer who had terrible sentences but great story: I always figured that he meant Matheson, whose prose was occasionally clunky but whose stories were almost always fascinating.

Have you seen the anthology where other writers got to play in his worlds? I wasn't fond of the I Am Legend story, but some of the others were wonderful.
Edited 2013-06-25 13:57 (UTC)

[identity profile] bruce munro (from livejournal.com) 2013-06-25 07:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Do you recall the name of the collection? It sounds interesting.