Ride the Nightmare by Richard Matheson. Ballantine (1959), 142 pp.
Chris Martin doesn’t seem like an unusual guy. He’s got a wife (Helen) and daughter (Connie), a successful business, and a home in Santa Monica. When a caller asks to speak to Chris Phillips, Helen thinks he has the wrong number. But the truth soon comes out. Years ago Chris was marginally involved in an Arizona jewelry store robbery. One of his three accomplices has escaped from prison and is determined to kill Chris. The man gets into the house and is himself killed in a bloody fight. Chris, convinced he’ll go to jail if he calls the police, enlists Helen to help bury the body in the hills. It’s not long before the other two accomplices show up.
The shortcomings of Ride the Nightmare do not lie in its unusual narrative strategy. The novel first takes Helen’s viewpoint so that readers can see her response to her husband’s dirty secret. Then the viewpoint shifts to Chris as he attempts to cope with the frightening events. The final part, containing the main action sequence, alternates between Helen and Chris. This works well. The major problem is in the motivation of the characters. Malicious as the prison escapees may be, they have more reasonable options than going after Chris. Chris, meanwhile, is unduly worried about the police. He didn’t actually participate in the robbery, and there’s no evidence against him. If he had made off with the proceeds of the crime, everything would make more sense. And if the characters had greater moral ambiguity, the outcome of the story would be less predictable. As is, the book is entertaining enough, but it’s not the spine tingler that Matheson probably hoped for.
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