Today, February 20, marks the anniversary of the births of two great short story writers.  One of them, Richard Matheson (1926-2013), will need no introduction. Ardath Mayhar (1930-2012), on the other hand, might not be familiar to you. We’ll start with Matheson because he was born first, but I’m going to focus more on Ardath.“Dress of White Silk”
originally published in F&SF, October 1951
currently available in The Best of Richard Matheson

Matheson is well known for his novels such as The Shrinking Man, What Dreams May Come, I am Legend, as Somewhere in Time, as well as his screenplays to Roger Corman’s adaptations of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.  But it’s his short fiction that has really had the greatest impact on me.

“Dress of White Silk” was one of Matheson’s early stories, and in the afterward to it in Richard MathesonCollected Stories Vol. 1: , he says he patterned it after “Born of Man and Woman”, in that it is told from a child’s perspective. That includes bad grammar and poor spelling. It’s a disturbing tale of a little girl who disobeys her grandmother and shows her mother’s dress of white silk to a neighbor friend. The story gets its impact as much as what’s not said as from what’s said. A nice little take on vampirism.

Ardath Mayhar was a writer from East Texas who wrote just a little bit of everything. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, westerns, and mainstream.  I had the privilege of meeting her several times. She was a feisty little old lady who wore her hair in a tight bun and carried a pistol in her purse. She also carried knitting needles and would knit a conventions.  The needles weren’t just for knitting, by the way. In Ardath’s hands, they could be weapons. Also, she wasn’t anything like politically correct and wasn’t afraid to share her opinion on anything.

I miss Ardath. She was a true character is the very best sense of the term.  When she passed away, I wrote this tribute.

“Trapline”
“Crawfish”
both currently available in The Ardath Mayhar Megapack, Vol 1

In his introduction to The Ardath Mayhar Megapack, Joe Lansdale talks about reading Ardath’s work for the first time in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents paperback anthology in the 1970s and the impact it had on him as  a writer. Namely, that he could write in an East Texas voice and didn’t have to try to write like someone from another part of the country.

The story Joe read was “Crayfish”. He said it reminded him of Robert Bloch. It’s a short little tale about a man who kills his wife, sinks her body in the river, and then begins wondering what the crayfish are doing to the corpse.  I see Joe’s point about the resemblance to Bloch. The story reminded me of Bloch’s “Enoch”.

The other story I read for this review was “Trapline”. It’s about a trapper up in the mountains. He’s not having a lot of luck with his traps. Then he comes across the body of a rival trapper who has frozen to death and decides to use the body as bait in his traps. When he does, his luck turns and he begins to catch all kinds of animals with valuable pelts and life is good. For a while that is…

If you’ve not read Ardath Mayhar, you need to give her a try.  Actually, you should probably give several of her stories a try, since her work was so wide and varied. Like the one about the old woman with a flying mule who would fly near an air force base. When the planes would scramble after the alarms went off, all they would see would be an old lady riding a mule slowly across a field…