Karen S. Wiesner: Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

by Karen S. Wiesner

Quite a few years ago, a trend started going around writing circles that was in direct opposition of everything I'd ever taught about going deep with characters. In this trend, writers were advised not to include more than basic information about main characters, allowing readers to fill in the blanks and make the characters whatever they want them to be. Can character development can be fluid enough to allow something like that without compromising everything vital in a story? In a word, no. Individual character choices directly influence outcomes. If a character isn't well defined, motives and purposes are constantly in question as well as in flux. Readers are more likely to say "Sucks for you" to characters they can't invest in, let alone care about enough to root for. Ultimately, characters that have no impact on readers make for a quickly forgotten story.

Personally, I want a good balance of character and plot development the any story I invest myself in. With most of the new stuff coming out, I'm not getting that. So I've been re-reading the books that have made it onto my keeper shelves in the past. To that end, here's another "oldies but goodies" review.

A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson was published in 1958. It's hard to imagine this amazing supernatural horror is actually that old. Matheson probably needs no introduction to most readers. He's a legendary author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, best known for I Am Legend, a personal favorite of mine.

In A Stir of Echoes, Tom Wallace's life is about as ordinary as it gets. I vividly remember reading it the first time and marveling at 1950s blasé parenting when Tom and his wife leave their new baby alone in the house and go across the street to party with the neighbors. Back then, baby monitors weren't really a thing. I suppose it wasn't a big deal back then. Everyone felt so safe. Not a world I can really imagine.

In any case, Tom is an ordinary man with an ordinary life until something weird happens to him and latent physic abilities are awakened inside him. Suddenly he's hearing what's going on in the minds of everyone, living and dead, around him. He finds himself the unwilling recipient of a message from beyond the grave.

I love one of the reviews of Matheson himself as the author (San Jose Mercury News): "Matheson is the master of paranoia--pitting a single man against unknown horrors, and examining his every slow twist in the wind." So accurate when it comes to the brilliance of this author.

The 1999 film adaptation with the name "Stir of Echoes" was fantastic, starring Kevin Bacon and providing the jump-out-at-you visuals that best serve this better-than-average ghost story. One of the other nice things I like so much about this story is that it's short. These days, everything you read is either really short or really long, almost no in-between. Sometimes you just want a streamlined, yet fully fleshed out story with vibrant characters that gives the reader no more and no less what's actually needed to tell a gripping tale. I highly recommend this classic, and the good news is you can probably immerse yourself in it and be out within a couple days.

Next week, I'll review another Oldie But Goodie you might find worth another read, too.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Considering Adaptations

That is, one adaptation in particular: CONJURE WIFE, by Fritz Leiber. It was first published as a magazine serial by UNKNOWN WORLDS in 1943, later revised and expanded for reprint in book form (in a trio of novels bound together in 1952, then as a stand-alone paperback in 1953). The 1943 version is the one Amazon sells in Kindle format. Wikipedia lists three movies inspired by CONJURE WIFE, the best-known (and the only one that seems to be available) being BURN, WITCH, BURN, with a script by classic horror writers Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Spoilers ahead, although surely the statute of limitations on spoilers has run out for an 80-year-old novel.

The protagonist, Norman, a sociology professor at a small, private college, discovers his wife, Tansy, has been secretly practicing witchcraft to advance his career and guard both of them against the malicious magic of certain older faculty wives. He persuades her to let him burn her protective charms. With those defenses gone, they're assailed by the full force of hostile spells. Norman repeatedly tries to convince himself they're facing only coincidental accidents and the mundane hostility of his professional rivals' wives, as evidence to the contrary piles up. Finally, to save Tansy's life and soul, he has to work a complicated spell himself under her direction. Although the story feels dated at points because of the Freudian approach to psychology Norman and his colleagues take for granted, the quiet horror remains unforgettably chilling.

Aside from the deletion of a few references to World War II, the main thrust of the rewrite tends toward adding ambiguity. The original starts with a discussion among three older witches on whether Tansy knows about them. The book includes several other brief scenes from their viewpoint. As a result, the reader knows from the beginning that witchcraft is real and evil forces are plotting against the protagonist and his wife. The expanded novel, on the other hand, is narrated entirely in the tight third person viewpoint of Norman. He constantly questions and second-guesses apparently magical incidents, regardless of his contrary feelings in the moment and the fact that, by the end, the reality of the supernatural within the text is perfectly clear to the reader.

Even after Norman experiences supernatural evil firsthand in the final confrontation with the older witches, in the revision doubt resurfaces in his mind afterward. In the original version, he concludes by accepting the fact of witchcraft and assuming they're not done with it: “There’s more behind this matter of the Balance than we may realize. There’s a lot we’ll do with this, but we’ll want to go slowly and test every step of the way.” At the end of the rewritten edition, Tansy asks whether he seriously believes in everything that has happened or finds himself reverting to the idea that the whole prolonged ordeal arose from coincidence and delusions. His reply, which constitutes the final sentence of the novel: "I don't really know."

The film BURN, WITCH, BURN deviates from the book at several points. For the most part, I realize why Matheson and Beaumont chose to make the changes they did. On the basic narrative level, naturally much of the background we get from Norman's stream of consciousness in the novel has to be revealed through dialogue in the movie, mainly the competitive tension underneath the smoothly polite conversations in the early scenes with his colleagues and their wives. The script omits most of the small mishaps Norman suffers, to highlight larger potential disasters. Most significantly, the entire climactic episode of Tansy's soul being captured by the senior witch is omitted, no doubt to streamline the plot to fit into the length of a feature film. Also, the writers might have thought that situation too complex to convey effectively through action and dialogue. Probably they figured a magical arson attack was more visually dramatic. Still, I was sorry to lose the deeply horrifying moment at the end of chapter fourteen (ten in the original) when Tansy, as a soulless automaton, answers Norman's magical summons. And, above all, we lose the novel's core premise, that all women are witches even if many of us don't fully understand or wholeheartedly believe in our own powers.

I'd love to see the book fully and faithfully adapted as a miniseries, but that seems like a farfetched daydream. BURN, WITCH, BURN, however, does come pretty close. Any fans of vintage horror would find it well worth their time.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.