RICHARD MATHESON – Someone Is Bleeding. Lion #137, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted in Noir – Three Novels of Suspense: Someone Is Bleeding; Fury on Sunday; Ride the Nightmare: Forge, hardcover & trade ppbk, 2005. (Previous limited edition: G & G Books, hc, 1997.)   Film: Fox-Lira, France, 1974, as Les Seins de Glace (Icy Breasts).

   While Richard Matheson would go on to become a major figure in the fields of fantasy and science fiction with such distinguished works as I Am Legend and his Shock! series of short-story collections, his first novel was solidly criminous — a book whose influences ran heavily to James M. Cain and Hemingway.

   Someone Is Bleeding is the somewhat overwrought tale of writer David Newton who meets a lovely but deeply disturbed young woman named Peggy Lister and falls into tormented love with her.

   Peggy, icon that she is, is surrounded by men whose overwhelming desire in life is to possess her. Because of her psychological problems, possession means keeping her physically around them — since it is unlikely that anyone will ever have her heart or mind, given her pathological distrust of men, which seems to stem from having been raped by her father.

   For its era, Bleeding was a surprisingly complex psychosexual tale. Peggy, a dark goddess who literally rules the fives of her men, is all the more chilling a woman for the sympathetic way in which David sees her for most of the book. She is the helpless, beautiful woman-child that many men fantasize about and long to protect as proof of their own masculinity.

   As the novel rushes to its truly terrifying climax (it is an ending that must rank, for pure horror, with the best of Fredric Brown and Cornell Woolrich), we see how much Peggy comes to represent the pawn in a quest. Her men are willing to scheme, lie, and die to have her.

   Despite its foreshortened structure, which gives it the singular tone of a short story, and despite the fact that the prose occasionally becomes overheated — one wishes for a flash of humor once in a while — Someone Is Bleeding is a satisfyingly complex, evocative study of loneliness, dream and pathology.

   Matheson also gives us an exceptionally good look at the Fifties and its snake-pit moral code, its demeaning view of women, its defeated view of men. He packs an icy poetry, a bittersweet love song, and moments of real terror into this debut.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Note:   This novel by Richard Matheson was previously reviewed on this blog by Dan Stumpf.