Lit Corner: Remembering Matheson By Reading *What Dreams May Come*

Having grown to admire Richard Matheson's work in recent years, I had to pull another of his books off the shelf during the outpouring over his death. I've already written about his substantial contributions to the Speculative Fiction canon, and today only want to discuss What Dreams May Come. It's an odd one to read as a farewell, being about a writer of novels and screen who dies and uneasily tours the afterlife. If the original audience felt he was writing about himself with all his sentimentality, abandoning much of his Horror roots, it reads even eerier this weekend.

I don't really remember the movie. Pretty sure this ain't in the book.

My copy contained an odd preface in which Matheson claimed only the characters were fictional. He'd studied so many near-death experiences, particularly those following suicide attempts, that he was convinced his vision of an afterlife was as accurate as it could get. Quite the claim from the guy who tried to make vampires plausible in I Am Legend. I largely tried to put it out of my mind as I consumed the book. It's a funky artist's statement to put in front of something otherwise so infinitely interpretable.

Whatever else I can say for What Dreams May Come, I never stopped wanting to read it. When I woke up Saturday morning, and my second thought was to read another chapter. That's an engagement very few books get, especially ones with so little plot. It's a simple novel, half a tour of a new-age Heaven ala Dante's Divine Comedy, and half a rescue mission into the incoherence of Hell.