Start with I am Legend. It runs under 200 pages, it took horror out of the gothic castle and put it in a suburb, and it invented the modern zombie apocalypse by way of vampires. The reason to read it rather than watch it is specific: it has been filmed three times and not one version keeps the ending, which is the entire point of the book.
Matheson wrote no series, so there is no sequence to get wrong — but there is a much better and a much worse way to approach him. The worse way is to work chronologically through the novels, which is how readers end up bogged in the afterlife book. The better way is to read the two 1950s novels that changed two genres, then go to the short stories, because the short stories are where Matheson actually lives.
The two that changed the genre
I am Legend first. Then The Shrinking Man, a man shrinking a seventh of an inch a day, written as an existential crisis about masculinity and scale rather than as a monster story. Note the titles: the 1956 novel is the one to read, and some editions carry the film's title, The Incredible Shrinking Man. Our record dates from a 1962 printing and runs 271 pages.
The supernatural novels
Hell House (1971) is the benchmark haunted-house novel and a deliberate answer to Shirley Jackson: where she withholds, Matheson escalates, and it is considerably nastier than its reputation suggests. Bid Time Return (1975) is the time-travel romance, later reissued as Somewhere in Time after the film — two separate records exist for the one novel, so buy only one. It won the World Fantasy Award and is sentimental in a way none of the horror is. What Dreams May Come (1978) is a researched, oddly literal novel of the afterlife written after his mother's death; Matheson considered it his most important book and most readers do not, which is exactly what makes it worth arguing with rather than skipping.
The short stories, which are the real reason
Matheson's reputation rests on roughly twenty short stories, and most of the famous films come from them. Duel is the collection headed by the story Spielberg filmed as his first feature: a truck, a car, no explanation, and the method in its purest form. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is the best single-volume selection, taking in the Twilight Zone story of the title, Prey and Born of Man and Woman — if you read one Matheson book after I am Legend, read this one. Buyer's note: our record for it carries a Spanish-edition ISBN despite the English title, so check the language. Collected Stories is the complete short fiction in a single 899-page volume with Matheson's own notes on each story, and the notes are the reason to own it.
The suspense novels
Three books with no supernatural element at all, much better than their pulp packaging suggests. A stir of echoes (1958) has a man hypnotised at a party who starts receiving impressions he cannot switch off; it is the most restrained thing Matheson wrote and arguably the most frightening. Someone Is Bleeding is his 1953 first novel, straight noir, published as a paperback original. Ride the Nightmare is a tight home-invasion thriller from 1959 that Hitchcock adapted for television. Our records for those last two are the modern ebook reissues, which is why they carry 2014 dates and no page count; the novels are from the 1950s.
The Matheson nobody expects
The beardless warriors (1960) is a realist novel about teenage infantry in Germany in 1944, drawn from Matheson's own service, with no genre elements whatever — and, sentence for sentence, the best-written book on this list. Journal of the gun years is a Western told as a gunfighter's journal dismantling his own legend, and it won a Spur Award, which surprises everyone who knows only the horror.
Where to stop
There is no completist case here. Matheson published prolifically into the 2000s and the late novels are weaker; the screenwriting, including a large stack of Twilight Zone episodes, is a separate career. Thirteen books is the whole argument for him. The ordered list with lengths is at the Richard Matheson path.
