Richard Matheson (1926-2013) was a prolific author and screenwriter whose career of more than 60 years has shaped the horror and fantasy genres in literature, film, and television. This volume examines seven of Matheson's full-length novels, a sampling of short stories, and several film adaptations. The chapters, which are arranged in three thematic sections, emphasize Matheson's historical prominence, consider his precursors and successors, and situate him within narrative traditions of mythology, cinema, genre, and memory studies.

Introduction Richard Matheson: Wisdom Writer Cheyenne Mathews Part I. I Am Legend: Influence and Intertextuality Chapter 1: "Crawling Out of the Middle Ages": The Deep Literary Roots of the Vampires in I Am Legend, Charles Hoge Chapter 2: "The last of the old race": I Am Legend and Bio-Vampire-Politics, Aspasia Stephanou Chapter 3: "Wild Work": The Monstrosity of Whiteness in I Am Legend, Adryan Glasgow Chapter 4: "The World is Quieter Now": The Threat of Silence in Night of the Living Dead and I Am Legend, Ruth Ellen Covington Chapter 5: Last-Person Narration: Cultural Imagination At the End of the World As We Know It, Glenn Jellenik Chapter 6: Who Killed All the Humans?: The Threat of Conformity, Consumerism, and Pure War in "Lemmings," Amy S. Jorgensen Part II. Norms from the 1950s to Now: Gender, Sexuality, and Race Chapter 7: Giant Bugs and Shrinking Men: Domesticating Technology in The Incredible Shrinking Man, Amanda Hagood Chapter 8: (Male) Matter and its Dissolution: Crisis of Masculinities as Horror in Richard Matheson's Short Stories, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns Chapter 9:"The Most Monstrous of Monsters": Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage in A Stir of Echoes and Earthbound, Rebecca Janicker Chapter 10: "Amelia" and Trilogy of Terror: Mother-Daughter Identification and the Oscillation of the Abject-Matrophobic, Kyle Christensen Chapter 11: "The Most Bizarre of All": Reading Progressive Race and Gender Identity Markers in "From Shadowed Places," Tiffany A. Bryant Chapter 12: "lice-infested, mule-eating Apaches!": The Intersection of the First Technological Revolution and Gothic Imperialism in Shadow on the Sun, Shannon Cummings Part III. The Forms of Matheson's Fiction Chapter 13: What Would You Do? Justice Between Destiny and Freedom in Richard Matheson's Short Fiction, Ralph Beliveau Chapter 14: A "private and particular hell": Mathesonian Noir in The Twilight Zone, Cheyenne Mathews Chapter 15: (Re)Presenting the Past: Bid Time Return as Historiographic Metafiction, Tanfer Emin Tunc Chapter 16: Locked in Time: Trauma, Memory, and the Barthesian Punctum in Richard Matheson's Fiction, Simon Bacon Chapter 17: Another Time: Novelizing History after the Canon in Matheson, Joshua Comer