The Funeral by Richard Matheson

The Funeral is one of those short stories that are just fun to read, because you can tell the writer had fun writing it. There’s no real message here, no lessons to be learned. It’s just a short story that was written because… Because it could. I can almost imagine Matheson writing it while attending a wedding or family reunion. Because that’s really what this story is about: a family gathering that includes all the embarrassing kin you hope to not see again for a decade or more.

 The story revolves around Asper, who the audience is led to believe is a vampire out to have a second chance at a funeral. He enlists the aid of Morton Silkline, a proprietor of final farewells. In Mr. Silkline’s case, money talks and he provides Asper with a funeral, even though he thinks it’s just a joke. On the appointed day, Mr. Asper and all his ghoulish buddies arrive. We get everything from famed hunchback Ygor to pointy-hatted witches, and all manner of monster in between.

And just like our family gatherings, there’s always that one person who ruins everything. In the case of Mr. Asper’s funeral, it’s a mouth witch. Just like that crazy aunt. Without a blow-by-blow rundown of the plot, I’ll say that the event goes downhill quickly.

The Funeral is just one of many short stories included in the paperback version I Am Legend. My theory is that Tor included the shorts as a way to make readers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth when by the extremely short novel. But while the main event is somber and carries a deep message, the short stories offer lighter fare. The Funeral shows that a serious novelist can get the sillies out without compromising the integrity of his/her other works.

Matheson writes good novels, and he writes good short stories. His style doesn’t change greatly from one to the other. He has the same expansive vocabulary and artistic narrative that was popular in its day. It’s a narrative that harkens back to a day when it was okay to have a formal vocabulary and people still dressed up to take a flight. So many novels today are written at what seems to be a fifth grade level to attract the most amount of readers. They’re the equivalent of wearing sweatpants and flip-flops on a trans-continental flight.

I really tried to find a deeper meaning in this piece, but each “message” I came up with seemed stretched, as if I was attempting to read more into it than was actually there. Maybe Matheson didn’t have a message, but a couple hours to kill. Maybe he was up at midnight working on some great masterpiece and decided he needed something silly to counteract the seriousness of the work in front of him.

If there is a pre-conceived message here, I think it’s that every family has that one relative you just wish wouldn’t show up, but you invite them anyway because they’re family and it wouldn’t be the same without them.