n a tale adapted for both the TV and movie versions of The Twilight Zone, and memorably lampooned on The Simpsons, an acrophobic airplane passenger named Wilson fights panic as he suffers through another commuter flight. The weather is stormy, the ride turbulent. Wilson, never a good flyer, sweats bullets until he finds himself moved to slide up the window shade. Then things get a lot worse. There's a monstrous gremlin on the wing, happily picking apart the engine, arranging a fatal crash destined to kill Wilson and everybody else on board—unless Wilson, the fidgety crank no one believes, can overcome his fear long enough to do something just plain crazy.
Meanwhile, on a bus, another nervous type by the name of Mr. Jasper has uncovered a pattern to the many aggravating annoyances that bother him every day. The fellow passenger who crinkles candy wrappers, the ladies who smoke next to him in the cafeteria and the upstairs neighbor who walks with the especially heavy stomp are all members of a worldwide conspiracy intent on driving him insane. But Mr. Jasper sees through their evil plot. Mr. Jasper knows what they're up to. Mr. Jasper is about to take extreme measures to fight for his very sanity.
Elsewhere, a shy young woman named Amelia has just taken home an African Zuni doll. It looks so fierce and forbidding, but she deserves a little eccentricity considering how much she's dominated by her mother.
They're all stories in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, a career retrospective of stories by veteran fantasist Richard Matheson.
Gnawing nightmares from the master
In his more than 50 years as a published writer, Richard Matheson has written more memorable tales than can possibly appear in a volume as thin as this one. Everybody interested in this field knows, or should know, the ones adapted for television, and the ones made into classic motion pictures. But those aren't all he's written, or all that deserve attention.
Take "The Distributor." One of Matheson's all-time best, it's the tale about a man calling himself Theodore Gordon who moves into a peaceful suburban neighborhood and, through the efficient use of rumor, gossip and malicious mischief, soon turns the block into a hellhole populated by bitter enemies. It's as classic a portrait of pure evil, as it exists in this world and not in some more supernatural sense, as any the horror/fantasy field has ever produced. Stephen King, good as he is, needed hundreds of pages to tell almost the same story, not remotely as well, in his novel Needful Things; Matheson managed it in a spare and chilling 20. Is there a supernatural explanation? Possibly. Gordon could be the devil. But he could just be a man who delights in sabotaging his fellow man—and we all know, too dearly, that the type exists.
The collection also includes "Blood Son," about a child who dreams of becoming a vampire, "The Children of Noah," about an unfortunate caught in a speed trap, and "The Holiday Man," about the tormented guy employed by the media to come up with the weekend fatality figures. There are 20 stories in all, many of them classics—and the merest taste of this man's impressive body of work.
