I am familiar with prolific American author-turned-screenwriter Richard Matheson (1926-2013) primarily because of his work on The Twilight Zone as well as on The Night Stalker, the 1972 TV movie that helped lead to Darren McGavin’s short-lived horror-fiction series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. My nephew Jason was also kind enough to give me a 2017 collection of this fictionist’s short stories, The Best of Richard Matheson, which includes the tale from which William Shatner’s famous 1963 Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” was adapted, along with “Duel,” the yarn that inspired the 1971 Steven Spielberg road thriller of that same name.
Matheson also wrote I Am Legend (1954), The Shrinking Man (1956), and What Dreams May Come (1978), all of which were made into films. And he published myriad short stores, assembled in such books as Born of Man and Woman (1954) and The Shores of Space (1957).
Embedded below are the night-terrors-provoking 1962 Gold Medal edition of The Shrinking Man and the 1969 Bantam version of The Shores of Space, both boasting Hooks cover art.
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I recently finished reading the The Shrinking Man. This same cover, too, but mine is not nearly as pristine. Spoiler alert: the spider was not a black widow as the red hourglass suggests, and his clothes did not shrink along with him.
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