Link, The (Book)
Dread Central Staff
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Written by Richard Matheson
Published by Gauntlet Press
349 pages
Richard Matheson. If you’re a horror fan, you know who he is. Even if you don’t know, you know. Trilogy of Terror? The Zuni fetish doll? That’s based on Matheson’s short story “Prey.” The Twilight Zone? The one about the thing on the wing of the plane? Matheson again. In fact, he wrote many episodes of that esteemed show, not to mention Night Gallery and The Outer Limits. He’s written novels, short stories, screenplays, and teleplays during a career that has spanned over 40 years and is still going strong. He’s been referred to as the Hemingway of Horror (which I’ve heard he doesn’t care for). The truth is, Matheson is the writer other horror writers want to grow up to be.
Matheson’s writing skill is consummate, and much of what he writes is so subtly terrifying that on the surface many wouldn’t call it horror. But even his sci-fi works contain this undercurrent of quiet terror that every true horror fan recognizes. He doesn’t fill his works with bloodthirsty monsters and zombies and gore and grue. But he leads you into dark rooms full of things moving and shifting that you can’t see…and leaves you there.
The Link is no different from much of Matheson’s work, and yet, it is completely different. Like Matheson himself, it is extremely difficult – impossible even – to pigeonhole. Part screenplay treatment, part story outline, part novel…all genius. In his introduction Matheson explains that what we are reading was originally intended to be a sort of outline for a miniseries that never came to be. Normally, this is not something we as fans would ever get to see. It’s part of the process of turning an idea into an actual visual product. It’s neither here nor there, but Matheson still manages to make it intriguing.
Our story follows Robert Allright, a writer who is contacted to adapt his book All Things Unexplained into a miniseries covering the history of parapsychology. As Robert begins his journey to the West Coast to meet with some studio guys, he also begins several other journeys, which we go on with him. We journey into the past as he begins to mentally outline what he’s going to write for the series as well as Robert’s personal past and that of his family.
We follow Robert from his home to California, New York, England, Russia, and Arizona. Throughout his travels we learn about both the past and present of parapsychology, psi, Robert…and mankind. Robert’s father, a strict and demanding archaeologist, wants him to continue a dig in the Arizona dessert, a dig that has something to do with human history and its future.
I don’t want to go into much more detail because the story is so interesting. Matheson manages to take an awful lot of factual and historical information and convey it through the actions and interactions of characters like Robert; his sister, brother, and daughter Ann; Cathy Graves and her fellow ESPA (Extended Sensory Perception Association) colleague, Peter Clarke; and of course the various historical figures involved with the past of psi. Matheson really brings them to life and makes their struggles and emotions so accessible. I teared up a couple of times throughout the story. There are one or two brief occasions where the information becomes too much data and science, but other than that, it’s all golden.
Matheson presents the facts and figures on the paranormal and parapsychology in such an intelligent way. He doesn’t force it down your throat or in any way demand that you believe the things he talks about but instead presents it in such a logical and plausible way that it almost becomes impossible not to believe it.
There really isn’t much else to say. It’s the paranormal. It’s Matheson. It’s good. Read it.
4 1/2 out of 5
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