By the Gun: Six from Richard Matheson (An Evans Western) [Hardcover]

Richard Matheson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Evans Novel of the West | Publication Date: January 1994

From Spur Award winner Richard Matheson, an unforgettable collection of six powerful tales of men who live and die by the gun on the lawless frontier. A city boy makes a name for himself as a gunslinger in a way he never could have expected; a ranchhand who beats a fast gun with pure luck is hounded by challengers; and more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though best known as a grandmaster of horror, Matheson is also a noted writer of westerns ( The Gunfight ) . This volume reprints four of his early sagebrush yarns--two short stories and two novellas--and presents two original stories. Matheson's trademarks are in evidence: the senseless but seemingly inevitable violence and brutality, the quickness and finality of death, a melancholy feeling of hopelessness, taut plotting and convincing dialogue. The best entry is the opening novella, "Gunsight," in which an aging lawman hides his growing blindness with the help of a local doctor. It's only in this work, the collection's oldest, that Matheson allows a hopeful, if ambiguous, ending, in which the hero is allowed to triumph and survive. Elsewhere, spirals of violence spin toward all-too-logical conclusions. In "Go West, Young Man" a kid from the East comes to the frontier to pursue a bloody dream, only to have his new life end before it's begun. "Boy in the Rocks" deals with a range war that needn't have occurred, while one of the new pieces, "Of Death and Thirty Minutes," laconically tells of a hostage situation with eerily modern overtones. Some of the early work reflects an author still polishing his craft, with genre cliches and hackneyed phrases marring the the prose and plotting.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

These six beautifully crafted short stories by a superb writer (Gunfight, LJ 3/15/93) feature guns of the Old West and the people who used them. Included are stories of a sheriff who is going blind yet fights to keep his town the most peaceful one in the state, a 16-year-old boy who kills to save his little herd of 50 cows, and a crazed gunman shooting up a saloon who is stopped dead by a young woman and a derringer. A book to keep and to cherish.
Sister Avila, Acad. of the Holy Angels, Minneapolis
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 171 pages
• Publisher: M Evans & Co; First Edition edition (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871317478
• ISBN-13: 978-0871317476
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,356,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Matheson was born in 1926. He began publishing SF with his short story 'Born of Man and Woman' in 1950. I Am Legend was published in 1954 and subsequently filmed as The Omega Man (in 1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (in 2007), starring Will Smith. Matheson wrote the script for the film The Incredible Shrinking Man, an adaptation of his second SF novel The Shrinking Man. The film won a Hugo award in 1958. He wrote many screenplays as well as episodes of The Twilight Zone. He continued to write short stories and novels, some of which formed the basis for film scripts, including Duel, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1971. A film of his novel What Dreams May Come was released in 1998, starring Robin Williams. Stephen King has cited Richard Matheson as a creative influence on his work.