Richard Matheson

What if you were told that you could make a fortune just by pushing a button on a box? But, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world...someone you don't know. Would you still push the button? "Button, Button," Richard Matheson's chilling tale of greed and temptation, is now the basis of The Box, the new film from the director of Donnie Darko. In addition, this outstanding collection also...

Government mathematician Chris Barton lives a routine life_x2014_until, at the end of an ordinary workday, he finds his car missing from the employee parking lot. When he finally arrives home, there is a stranger living in his house_x2014_a man who claims to be him. Thrust suddenly into a surreal world where the evidence of his senses cannot be trusted and strangers are trying to kill him, Chris must avoid violent assassins while following a trail...

Wild Bill Hickok was a celebrity before there ever was a Hollywood. And he was dead before he was forty. Now Richard Matheson, Spur Award-winning author of Journal of the Gun Years, delves into the life and times of James Butler Hickok... gunfighter, U.S. marshal, legend. The cruelty that turned him violent. The fears that drove him. And the historic events that cause his name to live on more than century later. A compelling vision of the man behind...

At 32, Chris Martin lives a conventional life. He's married with a daughter, runs his own small business, and is working to save up money for a bigger home with his wife, Helen. He is happy and content with this staid but comfortable existence-until a late weeknight phone call turns everything upside down. Chris hasn't always been the model family man he appears to be. And when his past catches up to him, the terror comes into his home-just where...

Young novelist Dave Newton is instantly smitten when he meets blonde, beautiful Peggy. But Peggy has a past full of abuse and terror-and she's involved with Jerry, a lawyer with mob connections and an old rival from Dave's college days. Soon, Dave finds himself caught in a love triangle with Peggy and Jerry, desperate to win her affections. But when corpses begin to pile up in Peggy's wake, Dave must face the truth that either Jerry is a mass murderer-or...

This is a tale of summer camp horror and mystery by the author of I Am Legend. Camp Pleasant is a place of natural beauty and campfire singalongs. But when Matt Harper arrives there to work as a counselor, he discovers it is also a place of unrelenting abuse and brutality. The new camp director "Big Ed" Nolan is such a bully that the bucolic paradise feels more like a miniature Third Reich . . . until someone finally has enough and kills Big Ed....

Few of Richard Matheson's readers know that he had hopes for writing popular music. At a very early age, Matheson taught himself how to write sheet music, but his family could not afford art supplies and so he had to give up composition. But music never left his mind and when Matheson found a creative new outlet through his writing (cheaper than music, requiring only a pencil and paper), he quickly began composing both prose stories as well as poetry....

A researcher encounters an exotic new strain of "Backteria" that causes the infected person to vanish-leading the doctor on a path of discovery deep into a past he should have left buried. A simple "Haircut" that starts off as a routine trim becomes a dark and terrifying experience when a barber is confronted with a sick customer who seems otherworldly. A case of mistaken identity leads to a darkly farcical story of marriage, murder, and a love that...

When a disease turns all of humanity into the living dead, the last man on earth becomes a reluctant vampire hunter.

"Weird Tales--the Unique Magazine celebrates a full century of brilliant, evocative, and genre-breaking storytelling with this book of new and classic works. Here you'l encounter landmark tales of the madness of cosmic horror, sword adn sorcery adventure, eerie occult detective mysteries, and much more. Legendary masters such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Richard Matheson, Tennessee Williams, C.L. Moore, Isaac Asimov & Frederick Pohl are joined...