Richard Matheson

The Argument

Richard Matheson is the most theologically serious of the twentieth-century horror and science fiction writers, and his significance for literary apologetics lies in the directness with which he engaged questions of the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and the relationship between love and death. What Dreams May Come is an explicit exploration of what happens after death — a vision of heaven and hell as states shaped by consciousness, by love, by the choices made in life.

I Am Legend — his most celebrated work — is a horror novel that is also a meditation on what it means to be the last human being, on the relationship between the normal and the monstrous, on how categories shift when the majority changes. The twist ending — that the human is now the legend, the monster in the vampires' world — is a sustained irony about the relativity of the categories we use to define humanity and monstrosity.

For literary apologetics, Matheson is the genre writer who used the conventions of horror and science fiction to address questions that literary fiction more often avoids: what happens after death, what love requires across the boundaries of mortality, whether consciousness survives the body. He gave fictional form to the questions that every human being eventually asks, and he did so with genuine seriousness.