'A Stir of Echoes' by Richard Matheson - Mid-Century Spooky Story

Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Mild spoilers, not of major plot points.) Interesting mid-century artifact. The narrator, Tom, is mildly paternalistic and condescending to every woman in his life, including his pregnant wife Anne. That gets annoying, but it's somewhat alleviated by the facts that a) he genuinely loves her and the children and b) nothing horrible happens to her in the furtherance of the plot.

The supernatural element of the story is less of the monster variety that went into the writing of I Am Legend (which I haven't read; I've only seen the film) and subsequently inspired George Romero to make Night of the Living Dead. It's more of the atmospheric/eerie/parapsychology type.

And it's nothing like the 1999 movie that starred Kevin Bacon. The movie took out the casual misogyny and replaced it with sexual violence; there isn't a hint of sexual violence in the book. Reading the book does, however, make certain points in the movie make a lot more sense. They're orphaned elements from the novel without the through line.

This book came out in 1958. The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM) I, modern psychology's text for diagnosing mental illnesses, first appeared in 1952, and psychology was a bit of a "trend" in the '50s. In 1954, The Bad Seed explored psychopathy, and the word "psycho" was cemented in the public mind by 1959 when Robert Bloch released Psycho.

A Stir of Echoes touches on abnormal psychology with one character, but it's more of a fanciful "what if our minds have hidden psychic powers?" novel. It's less muddled and more clear-cut than in the movie, especially when it comes to Tom and Anne's 4-year-old, Richard. What's happening to Richard in the movie doesn't really resemble his little bit of involvement in the book.

Bottom line: Someone should write an updated script based on the book, without the implication that femaleness itself is a mild mental illness.

I borrowed this audiobook from my local library using the Libby app and was not obligated in any way to review it. Richard Matheson doesn't care because he died in 2013. I got the idea to borrow it from listening to Podcast Like It's 1999.

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