Ride the Nightmare -- Richard Matheson

RIDE THE NIGHTMARE, originally published by Ballantine in 1959, is the third and final suspense novel by Richard Matheson reprinted in the Forge Books collection, NOIR. It’s also my favorite of the three, although I admired and enjoyed SOMEONE IS BLEEDING and FURY ON SUNDAY, too.

RIDE THE NIGHTMARE has a fairly typical set-up for a novel of this sort: Chris and Helen Martin are living a happy suburban life with their young daughter Connie when something happens to disrupt it and put them all in mortal danger, in this case a phone call from someone who claims to know Chris . . . and who also wants him dead. Chris’s past contains a dangerous secret that Helen never knew about, and once that barrier is breached, things just get worse and worse for both of them.

There’s nothing in the plot you won’t see coming, but what makes it work so well is purely a matter of style and pacing. Poor Chris and Helen hardly ever get a breather before something else terrible comes barreling down on them, and Matheson is a master at keeping the reader flipping the pages to find out what’s going to happen next. In lesser hands, this technique can get a little silly. Not in this case, though, as Matheson pulls it off just fine. I highly recommend this novel, and for that matter, the entire collection . . . although I might quibble a little with the title, since I don’t consider any of the novels to truly be noir. As examples of straight suspense, though, you won’t find many that are better.

Fury on Sunday -- Richard Matheson

A while back I read and enjoyed Richard Matheson’s first suspense novel, SOMEONE IS BLEEDING, originally published by Lion Books in 1953. Now I’ve read his second novel, FURY ON SUNDAY, also published by Lion in 1953, and I liked it even better.

I have a fondness for books that take place in a short period of time. Everything in FURY ON SUNDAY happens during a four-hour span, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. The plot is pretty simple: crazed pianist Vincent Radin escapes from the insane asylum where he’s locked up and sets out to kill the two people who have most wronged him, his former manager and the man who wound up marrying the woman Vincent was in love with when he went mad. Matheson cuts back and forth relentlessly between this handful of characters, creating a very effective atmosphere of suspense. His prose is pared right down to the bone, as it needs to be in a book of this type where the pacing is so important. It works here, whereas I thought the writing was rushed and sketchy at times in SOMEONE IS BLEEDING.

This novel is rare in its original edition but easily available in the Forge Books omnibus NOIR. It’s well worth reading.

Someone Is Bleeding -- Richard Matheson

For years I’ve heard good things about Richard Matheson’s early suspense novels, but I’d never read any of them until now. SOMEONE IS BLEEDING was in fact Matheson’s first novel, published by Lion Books in 1953. That’s the cover from that edition you see over to the left, but I actually read the novel in a much more recent trade paperback omnibus edition published by Forge Books, which also includes FURY ON SUNDAY and RIDE THE NIGHTMARE. I’ll be reading them soon, I hope.

SOMEONE IS BLEEDING is the story of young would-be author David Newton, who goes to California to write novels after seeing action in Europe during World War II. Some of this background is drawn from Matheson’s own life, but not, I hope, the main storyline, which finds Newton meeting and falling in love with a beautiful young woman who may or may not be a psychotic killer. Matheson keeps the story racing along, throwing all sorts of obstacles in the path of Dave and the beautiful but possibly deadly Peggy, including a shady lawyer, a former mob hitman working as a chauffeur, a dogged police detective, and a series of ice pick murders. The introduction to the reprint edition mentions that Anthony Boucher’s review of this book compared it to the work of Cornell Woolrich, and I can see that. Dave Newton is very reminiscent of some of Woolrich’s everyman protagonists who find themselves caught up in nightmarish, dangerous situations.

My reaction to this book was rather mixed. Matheson’s spare prose is very effective most of the time. The plot twists back and forth quite a bit, which I like, and the portrait of post-war Los Angeles is good. There’s a great chase scene, something you usually think of more in terms of movies than books, but Matheson sure makes it work here. And the book has a real punch-in-the-gut ending.

However, at times the writing seems more rushed and incomplete than terse, and Dave Newton is so wishy-washy that it’s kind of hard to root for him. He also has a habit of doing dumb things for no good reason other than to keep the plot moving along. Overall, though, Matheson’s ability to create an atmosphere of tension and menace and dread is enough to overcome those problems, I think, making this a book that’s well worth reading. And I certainly enjoyed it enough to look forward to reading the other two books in the reprint volume.