Richard Matheson was a writer unhappy with the rectitude of reality and created incredible worlds of other dimensions with his fables and characters
Everything depends on the way you work, "he assured me. Of the work that you carry out
-Richard Matheson
Even the greatest writers need mentors, someone who has inspired them to grow and achieve everything they have achieved. Inspiration is a sudden lucidity that all people feel to sprout creativity, the word literally means "receive breath" and this is just what great writers receive from other great writers.
We all have those figures we admire, sometimes from childhood or throughout growth. We become faithful students and their biggest followers. We find everything perfect in what you do and we want to be at your level, we want to be as big as they are, although little by little you adapt your own style. This is what happened to Stephen King, a master of modern horror literature, with the author of I Am Legend, Richard Matheson, expert writer on opening the mind.
The writer of It and The Glow confesses himself a faithful admirer of Richard Matheson, writer and screenwriter of the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres. King considers that Matheson was one of the greatest of its kind and recognizes the strength of his stories and the way to surprise in each of its lines.
Richard Burton Matheson was an American writer and journalist who began his career writing stories for the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper. Then he would start publishing stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in California, in order to immediately reach fame with "Born of Man and Woman", his first story published in 1954.
The Shrinking Man, published in 1956, was King's favorite book when he was 8 years old, the same work from which years later they would make a film adaptation. Thus, King states that Matheson "showed him the way", and thanks to that he wanted to do the same and follow in his footsteps. The author of Las playas del espacio not only wrote stories, he also wrote film and television scripts, he wrote episodes for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock's Hour, Uncharted Dimension and Amazing Stories.
I am a legend is considered his greatest novel, which was then taken to the big screen on several occasions with unsatisfactory results. History generates questions such as: What really makes a society? What are we humans made of? and what is our nature ?, themes that delighted the creator of this novel, as it put us on a balance between subjectivity and the reality of our lives.
The influence of this writer at present led to the production in 2010 of a chapter of the television series Father of Family based on one of his stories, called "The Splendid Source": in that episode the characters decide to undertake a search for everything United States to locate and know the source of the world's green jokes and discover that it is more complicated than they thought; however, they are abducted unexpectedly and taken to a remote island, where they discover a secret society and the greatest geniuses of the planet create the green jokes they were looking for.
Richard Matheson, Stephen King's teacher
Matheson was a writer unhappy with the rectitude of reality and created incredible worlds of other dimensions with his fables and characters. Although all his stories are not subject to our reality, are based on the basic morals of man and thanks to that their stories are adapted to any time. The inspiration for Matheson at the time of writing did not come from some haunted house, from a tenebrous basement or from a demon, but from the ignorance of who one is, element that he captured in all his psychedelic works, in which to have a limited conception it's not allowed.
What he tries to do with our minds is that we see reality from a different perspective, invert reality and normality to another dimension and that we let the mind fly a bit utopically.
The trail and legacy of Matheson is hidden in more works and projects than we are aware of. As we go looking for the references, we realize its importance. Now you have discovered the silent operator of large-scale projects, inspiration for great writers and film directors, including Stephen King and Brian Lumley. A man capable of taking you to another dimension of your own reality, full of metaphors and science fiction, your world seen from another angle.
