His first
short story, "Born of Man and Woman," appeared in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in
1950. The tale of a monstrous child chained in its parents' cellar, it was told in the first person as the creature's diary (in poignantly non-idiomatic English) and immediately made Matheson famous. Between 1950 and
1971, Matheson produced dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres.
Several of his stories, like "Third from the Sun" (1950), "Deadline" (1959) and "Button, Button" (1970) are simple sketches with
twist endings; others, like "Trespass" (1953), "Being" (1954) and "Mute" (1962) explore their characters' dilemmas over twenty or thirty pages. Some tales, such as "The Funeral" (1955) and "The Doll that Does Everything" (1954) incorporate zany
satirical humour at the expense of genre clichés, and are written in an hysterically overblown prose very different from Matheson's usual pared-down style. Others, like "The Test" (1954) and "Steel" (1956), portray the moral and physical struggles of ordinary people, rather than the then nearly ubiquitous scientists and superheroes, in situations which are at once futuristic and everyday. Still others, such as "Mad House" (1953), "The Curious Child" (1954) and perhaps most famously, "Duel" (1971) are tales of
paranoia, in which the everyday environment of the present day becomes inexplicably alien or threatening.
He wrote a number of episodes for the American
TV series
The Twilight Zone, including "
Steel," mentioned above and the famous "
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"; adapted the works of
Edgar Allan Poe for
Roger Corman and
Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out for
Hammer Films; and scripted
Steven Spielberg's first feature, the TV movie
Duel, from his own short story. He also contributed a number of scripts to the Warner Brothers western series "The Lawman" between 1958 and 1962. In 1973, Matheson earned an
Edgar Award from the
Mystery Writers of America for his teleplay for
The Night Stalker, one of two TV movies written by Matheson that preceded the series
Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Matheson also wrote the screenplay for
Fanatic (US title:
Die! Die! My Darling!) starring
Talullah Bankhead and
Stefanie Powers.
Novels include
The Shrinking Man (filmed as
The Incredible Shrinking Man, again from Matheson's own screenplay), and a science fiction
vampire novel,
I Am Legend, which has been filmed three times, twice under the titles
The Omega Man and
The Last Man on Earth, respectively, and once under the
original title. Other Matheson novels turned into notable films include
What Dreams May Come,
Stir of Echoes,
Bid Time Return (as
Somewhere in Time), and
Hell House (as
The Legend of Hell House) and the aforementioned
Duel, the last three adapted and scripted by Matheson himself. Three of his short stories were filmed together as
Trilogy of Terror, including "Prey" with its famous Zuni warrior doll.
In 1960, Matheson published
The Beardless Warriors, a nonfantastic,
autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II. During the 1950s he published a handful of
Western stories (later collected in
By the Gun); and during the 1990s he published Western novels such as
Journal of the Gun Years,
The Gunfight,
The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok and
Shadow on the Sun. He has also written a blackly comic
locked-room mystery novel,
Now You See It..., aptly dedicated to
Robert Bloch, and the suspense novels
7 Steps to Midnight and
Hunted Past Reason.
Matheson cites specific inspirations for many of his works.
Duel derived from an incident in which he and a friend,
Jerry Sohl, were dangerously tailgated by a large truck on the same day as the
Kennedy assassination. A scene from the
1953 movie
Let's Do It Again in which
Aldo Ray and
Ray Milland put on each other's hats, one of which is far too big for the other, sparked the thought "what if someone put on his own hat and that happened," which became
The Shrinking Man.
Somewhere in Time began when Matheson saw a movie poster featuring a beautiful picture of
Maude Adams and wondered what would happen if someone fell in love with such an old picture. In the introduction to
Noir: 3 Novels of Suspense (1997), which collects three of his early books, Matheson has said that the first chapter of his suspense novel
Someone is Bleeding (1953) describes exactly his meeting with his wife Ruth, and that in the case of
What Dreams May Come, "the whole novel is filled with scenes from our past".
According to
film critic Roger Ebert, Matheson's scientific approach to the supernatural in
I Am Legend and other novels from the 1950s and early 1960s "anticipated pseudorealistic fantasy novels like
Rosemary's Baby and
The Exorcist."
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