I'm pretty forgiving with my reviews (I gave the Da Vinci Code three stars for Christ sake) but I really struggled to find anything worthwhile in this shoddy and poorly written pseudo-thriller. The whole thing is just a mess; it reads like Matheson pumped out a first draft then never went back to revise it or even check to see whether its plot made logical sense. Add in a main character who cannot help but utter the phrase "Christ Jesus!" every other page while bumbling around in a hard-headed incredulous daze and you have the recipe for a very irritating read indeed.

Oh, and the ending. Don't get me started on the ending...

Look, Richard Matheson's a legend and one of the greatest short story horror writers of the twentieth century. But God on Earth knows what he was doing here. It's the sort of book that makes me think I could write one, if only I could vomit enough words onto the page.

Avoid. ( )

I'm pretty forgiving with my reviews (I gave the Da Vinci Code three stars for Christ sake) but I really struggled to find anything worthwhile in this shoddy and poorly written pseudo-thriller. The whole thing is just a mess; it reads like Matheson pumped out a first draft then never went back to revise it or even check to see whether its plot made logical sense. Add in a main character who cannot help but utter the phrase "Christ Jesus!" every other page while bumbling around in a hard-headed incredulous daze and you have the recipe for a very irritating read indeed.

Oh, and the ending. Don't get me started on the ending...

Look, Richard Matheson's a legend and one of the greatest short story horror writers of the twentieth century. But God on Earth knows what he was doing here. It's the sort of book that makes me think I could write one, if only I could vomit enough words onto the page.

Avoid. ( )

The protagonist in this story, Chris Barton, a mathematician working for the government, is often shrouded in a state of confusion, which is how I felt while reading the story. The story starts when Chris leaves his office to find his car missing, and the parking attendant swears there was no such car in the lot. He drives a borrowed car and picks up a hitchhiker, who questions Chris’s grasp on reality and makes a strange wager with him. When he gets home, there is another Chris Barton in his house, who calls the police on him. When Chris kills a man in self-defense he has to flee the country. The story only gets even weirder when he arrives in London.

The novel was certainly interesting. It made me want to keep on reading to figure out exactly what was going on. On the downside, I never really got a good handle on what was really happening. The overall strangeness of the novel left me a little ambivalent. On the positive side, it was well-written novel, as one would expect from Richard Matheson. The quality of his story telling was evidenced here. It is worth reading, but I would temper my expectations.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street ( )

Chris Barton’s work on a secret ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system for the Pentagon has stalled, just like Chris’ life. Things begin to break out of the rut for the genius mathematician when his car is stolen from the parking lot of government installation where he works. Chris borrows a car from a co-worker to get home for some late-night reading and sleep, but he never makes it to the safe confines of home and hearth. A hitch-hiker challenges Chris to a wager, a wager that Chris can’t differentiate what’s real and what’s unreal in his own life. When Chris finally reaches his house, he finds that he has been replaced by another Chris Barton. Over the course of the next few days, Chris finds himself the focus of an international cabal of spies and killers. But is it real, or is Chris’ mind unraveling?

Richard Matheson is a superb story-teller with a keen eye for truly human characters, especially ones with a fragile grip on reality. In an earlier short story “Person to Person”, Matheson tells the story of a man who is hearing voices in his head. In that story, Matheson never reveals where the voices originate, whether a symptom of a broken psyche or a government experiment or a communion with evil. The ambiguity taps into every reader’s own sense of reality and fear and makes for good, if somewhat troubling, reading.

With [7 Steps to Midnight], Matheson taps into the same sort of dilemma, allowing the reader full access to Chris Barton’s confused and frightened mind as he tries to sort the real from the unreal. For the balance of the story, we are compelled to try and decipher the ever-twisting circumstances to make sense of what Barton cannot make sense of. And, again, the result is a riveting read.

Sadly, the last few pages of the book destroy the carefully balanced and unsolvable equation. The conclusion of the books is hurried and blunt, explaining away all of the earlier conundrums with no loose ends. It’s as if the publisher or editor demanded a ‘hero-gets-the-girl-and-fools-everyone’ ending from Matheson, and that he wrote it hoping that it would be bad enough that they’d never publish the book with the ending – but he was wrong.

Bottom Line: A great book for all but the last few pages – read it for Matheson’s ability to put you inside a disturbed and confused mind, and then forget the ending.

4 bones!!!!
(Would have been more bones but for just the last few pages.) ( )

Sorry, Richard, I usually enjoy your books, but this is one of the worst novels I have read in a long time. The twists and turns and inane repetitions of chases and mysterious meetings and people getting killed just as they were going to reveal some useful bit of information grew tiresome very quickly, and the clunky dialogue, wooden characters and plethora of typos certainly didn’t help. Still, I stuck with it, hoping that the revelatory twist would make up for everything. Yet, when it came, I — like the beleaguered main character — was justifiably angry at its inanity. ( )