Its shadowed walls have witnessed scenes of unimaginable horror and depravity. įor more than 20 years, Belasco House has stood empty. The Link is a must-read, if only to see how a medium truly changes the way a story is consumed.From Richard Matheson, author of I am Legend, comes his most frightening and shocking book, Hell House – an indisputable horror classic. What made the project equally unwieldy yet compelling was how Matheson took his time, exploring the absolute depths of parapsychology unabashedly, resulting in long, drawn-out scenes. Yet The Link still exists in its original treatment format, in which it tells the tale of a man named Robert Allright seeking out his family’s dark and deeply psychic past. The project effectively became an unprecedented 2000-page novel, unreadable and unsellable. Matheson hoped to turn The Link into a novel, but it soon lengthened to 800 pages for part one alone.
But as he struggled to condense his manuscript and accommodate the studio’s many demands, ABC finally lost interest, rendering The Link defunct. The studio then decided they wanted to cut the series down to seven hours. In turn, Matheson delivered an astounding 557-page outline. In the 1970s, ABC contacted Matheson about writing a 20-hour television mini-series. This screenplay-turned-novel has a bit of backstory you should know about. So once you’ve finished I Am Legend (if you’re reading this, odds are you already have), try these lesser-known and utterly creepy Richard Matheson books. We’ll leave I Am Legend out of this list, if only because it’s the gateway to Matheson’s equally frightening and illuminating body of work. But maybe you’re having trouble figuring out where to start.
Related: Here's the Next Haunting Horror Book You Should Read Based on Your Zodiac Sign Let’s not forget the many film adaptations of his work-including 2007’s I Am Legend starring Will Smith (for a more faithful adaptation of Matheson’s novel, try 1971’s The Omega Man), the heartbreaking afterlife tale, What Dreams May Come, starring the late Robin Williams, and the often forgotten Stir of Echoes, where you get to see Kevin Bacon utterly lose his shit. A little more about just how prolific Matheson was: He wrote over 100 short stories, 28 novels, 16 episodes for The Twilight Zone, and scripts for various other television shows like Lawman and Star Trek: The Original Series.
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