Button, Button: Uncanny Stories

As the lengthiest story in the Uncanny Stories collection, “Mute” acts as an intense examination of the protagonist and his experience, and Matheson takes his time in describing Paal’s pain at being thrust into this new and frightening world and losing the only life, family, and language that he ever knew. The boy’s initial appearance is mysterious and uncertain, and the initial descriptions in the narrative imply that he may have been the one to start the fire, given that he is found alone and unharmed while his parents burn alive, and he also says nothing about what happened. Notably, the sheriff and his wife take Paal’s silence as a sign of neglect, and although their assessment is not entirely inaccurate, Matheson also indicates that their determination to force Paal to conform to mainstream society is also traumatic and harsh despite their good intentions.

Central to the story is Matheson’s ability to portray everyday actions such as speech to be inherently strange. For example, Paal’s experience of hearing the spoken word for the first time is excruciating, and Matheson invokes images of violence to convey the boy’s silent shock, equating speech itself to “[f]ists striking at delicate acuteness. Hands squeezing sensitivity from the vibrant ganglia of [Paal’s] mind” (119). Matheson also implies that the common act of conveying thought via speech inherently limits the ideas behind the words. Focusing on Paal’s experiences, the author describes words as “[b]lunt, sawed-off lengths of hemmed-in meaning; incapable of evocation, of expansion. Black figures on white…Each word a trap, stalking his mind. A snare set to enclose fluid and unbounded comprehension” (133). Thus, given that Paal inevitably loses his telepathic abilities to the constant barrage of human speech, the story ends with a bittersweet note, woefully stating, “[S]o often, evil could come of misguided good” (142). Matheson therefore indicates that although Cora and the sheriff mean only to help Paal, their actions essentially destroy everything that he once was and force him to become what they believe he should be.

While “Mute” focuses on a single individual’s experience and strikes a serious note, “The Creeping Terror” is a purely satirical portrayal of the stereotyped, oversimplified view that Los Angeles (and California in general) often introduces radical cultural shifts that spread eastward to eventually overtake more conservative communities and transform the entire country. By portraying the complex, multifaceted phenomenon of cultural evolution as a literal expansion of a single city, Matheson pokes fun at real-world factions who express reactionary horror at the spread of new ideas from one particular locale. Throughout the narrative, Matheson draws on stereotypes of Angelenos to create humorous problems that result from the strange phenomenon of the city’s literal spread, such as elderly women wearing halter tops. Matheson’s use of irony and sarcasm becomes particularly prominent when an article relays how a scientist discovered “signs of life in LA” (146). This wording is a subtle jab at the (largely inaccurate) stereotype that people from Los Angeles tend to be shallow and dim-witted. While most of Matheson’s stories are designed to exude a dark tone, “The Creeping Terror” represents a deliberate departure from this trend, demonstrating that science fiction can also be blended with humor and satire.

“Shock Wave” marks a return to the collection’s largely ominous tone, featuring an elderly protagonist who cannot accept the reality that his career and his life are coming to an end. He projects this feeling onto his organ, which represents his career, his passion, and the life force within him. As the organ dies, so too does Mr. Moffat begin to wither. Matheson personifies the organ to illustrate Mr. Moffat’s despair and his grief over the decline of his own life. As the narrative states, “Now pressure found its peak, each pipe shuddering with storm winds. Tones and overtones flooded out in a paroxysm of sound. The hymn fell mangled underneath the weight of hostile chords” (178). In a philosophical sense, the organ represents Mr. Moffat's resistance to change, becoming a symbol of the man’s “hatred of a world that had no use for aged things” (180). Thus, as the organ vengefully destroys everything around it even as it succumbs to a violent demise, its fate wordlessly articulates Mr. Moffat’s own feelings of uselessness and fury at the world as he approaches the end of his life. It is clear that he rails against society’s unjust and ignorant dismissal of the elderly, and in this context, the organ’s sound becomes a powerful force that tears down the entire church. Ironically, Mr. Moffat thus becomes his own worst enemy by destroying the only thing he loves, and the only semblance of hope in his story lies in the fact that his cousin refuses to let him die. Thus, this glimmer of optimism at the end reflects the collection’s thematic focus on Hope in the Wake of Destruction.