Started off meh and went downhill from there with each passing story. By the middle of the book I was skimming stories until I just gave up. ( )

3.5 stars!

Richard Matheson is a legend in my eyes, (see what I did there, bibliophiles?) so when I saw this audio available from the library I immediately checked it out.

Any collection has hit or misses for me. Here, I'll focus on the hits:

Button, Button (I believe this is the story the movie The Box was based on.) If someone came to your door, handed you a box and said: "If you press this button, someone you do not know will die, but you will receive $50,000.", would you press the button?

Dying Room Only had a very cool Twilight Zone feel to it. Picture this: A man and a woman are taking a drive through the desert and stop in a little town diner for lunch. The man goes to the men's room and...disappears. Cue the TZ music!

A Flourish of Strumpets This one might be a tad outdated, but it had me laughing my butt off!

It seemed as if the stories in the beginning were more my speed. As I got deeper into the book, the stories began to resonate with me less and less. Still, even middle of the road Matheson stories are good. Since I think Button, Button is a CLASSIC short story that everyone should read, I recommend this collection to fans of horror shorts.

( )

Disappointing collection of Matheson stories reissued to tie into an illfated movie based on the title story. Of the group of stories only a couple rise above mediocre. What has always appealed to me about Matheson is his ability to take the amazing and place it amidst the very ordinary. His straightforward style creates a kind of normalcy that grounds the unreal in reality. BUTTON, BUTTON and MUTE and NO SUCH THING AS A VAMPIRE all work quite well. Can't imagine the title story being tortured into a full length movie. Appreciated MUTE in particular for it's balancing of two paths that could be positive crossing in painful fashion. Some of the others are either mediocre or just plain awful. THE CREEPING TERROR has a cute premise completely run into the ground--the terror came from the fact that it never seemed to end. And TIS THE SEASON TO BE JELLY was apocalyptic mutation simply irritating. THE JAZZ MACHINE was good and truthful in it's way but the use of old bluesman dialect and even song phrasing...well, my jury is still out on that one. ( )

It's always good news when another Richard Matheson story gets put on the silver screen. There have been plenty of them too, like "I Am Legend" (done three times!) and "Bid Time Return" (as "Somewhere in Time", with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) and several others of varying quality. Granted, the films may not always be much to speak of — "The Box" is more a Cameron Diaz vehicle than anything else — but when the movie comes out, the next thing that usually happens is that a book is released, and in this case, it's a reissue of the short story collection that contained the source material for the film, namely, "Button, Button". And THAT is something to celebrate!

Some of us may have heard this story first, weirdly enough, on the radio. The old CBS Radio Mystery Theater did it in the mid 70s as, "The Chinaman Button". It also showed up on one of the remakes of The Twilight Zone. The concept is disturbingly simple: a box with a button shows up on your doorstep, followed shortly thereafter by a man who explains the box…if you press the button, somewhere, someone you know will die. But you'll get a large sum of money in return. In the original story it's 50 large…in the movie it was a million. Inflation, you know.

So that's the idea. I'm sure you get the picture that this isn't exactly how it all develops. Matheson does it best, in the simplest of ways, as he so often does. And that's just the beginning...there's an even dozen stories contained in this all-too-slim volume. If I have a problem with any of it, it's that just as you're getting into one story, it's over! But that's okay. Not every meal is triple burger.

If they're not all exactly frightening, every story will definitely get your attention, and, as they did with me, they'll certainly whet your appetite for more by Matheson. My favorite of the lot? Probably "A Flourish of Strumpets", which is laugh-out-loud funny rather than scary, and "The Jazz Machine", which goes quite the opposite direction and describes a man who has created a device which translates jazz to its base emotions. What a concept!

So if it's not necessarily a full meal, it's certainly a fine collection of hors d'oeuvres. Now, tuck in! ( )

I read this as part of the reading challenge I'm doing with @myaddiction2books. I was supposed to read a collection of short stories and, while I originally had planned on reading I am Legend, by Richard Matheson, I saw this at the library and couldn't resist. It intrigued me. The stories were quite "out there" but most of them were good and interesting. They were a few that I didn't really enjoy but overall a nice collection. ( )