1954, reading from pages 203-220 in the 1995 collection I Am Legend

This story is so disturbing and revolting I must compare it to Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, which I found so chilling that I do not want to be tasked with considering it anymore and have declined to review it, although I somehow managed to sit through the entire weirdly psychedelic thing.

The remarkable thing about Dance of the Dead is that it was ever published in 1954—or even written. Matheson must have known about LSD experimentation, or perhaps have been involved. Dance of the Dead is set to horrifically campy lyrics of nihilistic post WWIII songs sung by three jaded thrill-seeking college students heading into a ghostly husk of a Midwestern city to party with their new friend, a girl who keeps reminding herself that mother admonished her to be careful who she socialized with, as the 1997 convertible roars down the lonely road toward a bizarre destination, one of the most bizarre in literature.

I like how Matheson does not give a date, only the date of the car, which seems to have been made before Civilization’s global suicide. Some might laugh at Matheson’s assumption—as all writers of his age did—that WWIII would strike before or around the turn of the 21st Century, and here we now sit having escaped it.

Or have we?

Matheson writes of a drugged world, a world overrun and undermined—even transformed—by the human being’s craving to escape his penned in lot through chemical alteration of the brain.

Also, though Matheson and others of his time thought only of highly centralized industrial scale war, we do have two parallel decentralized low intensity world wars ongoing, and even openly declared by our masters; ‘The War on Drugs’ [now exactly 40 years old and grinding it out in third gear] and ‘the War on Terror’ [a lucky 13 years old and just getting into second gear]. We also have a growing number of addicts in America and a growing number of cultural protestors who look back to the late 1990s as a time on the brink, before their civilization felt its death shudder.

Matheson’s work is brilliant, even the tales I’d rather not read.