But Frank didn’t like Saturday work and had managed to beg off that particular day. Another neighbor, Frank Wanamaker, and I usually drove to and from the plant together, alternating cars. We were living in Hawthorne, renting a two-bedroom tract house owned by one of our next-door neighbors, Mildred Sentas. My name is Tom Wallace I work in Publications at the North American Aircraft plant in Inglewood, California. THE DAY IT ALL STARTED-A HOT, August Saturday-I’d gotten off work a little after twelve. Not enough to stop me enjoying the book, but enough that it didn't have nearly the same kind of impact as I Am Legend, which I continued to think about for quite some time. That said, towards the end, certain aspects did start to feel a little contrived. They soon come to realise that the hypnosis has released some form of innate hypersensitivity of which Tom hadn't been aware.I made the mistake of taking this to read in the bath with me and ended up wrinkled like a prune - it took a lot of will power to put it down long enough to get out the bath! It's very tense and the sense of Tom's mounting curiosity mixed with confused fear is very well conveyed. Everything seems fine, even amusing at the time, but that night, he sees the apparition of a woman in a black dress in their living room. However, messing around at a dinner party given by a neighbour, he allows his brother-in-law to hypnotise him. I didn't realise that it was based on a novel, (which, in fact, came long before "Sixth Sense") until I came across the book randomly a couple of years ago - and, as it was written by Richard Matheson (I loved I Am Legend - the book that is), I had to buy it.Tom Wallace leads a fairly normal life in the suburbs of LA with his wife Elizabeth (expecting their second child) and son Richard. There was a film adaptation of this years ago, not long after "Sixth Sense" came out and I remember thinking at the time that it seemed just to be more of the same. It's short, fast, and packs a real punch. It's the quiet moments, spent alone in the dark with what's inside - and outside - your mind that makes this so effective.įor me, one of the best haunting novels ever written. The Kevin Bacon movie went all out on the special effects for this one, but they weren't needed. Matheson makes it work by populating the tale with believeable characters, and by hitting us with several set pieces that not only ramp up the tension but are genuinely creepy and have that 'cold tingle in the spine' moment that marks all the best ghost stories. A working man gets hypnotized, hypnotist accidently opens the man's mind to the great beyond, and man starts to experience the wider world of the weird beyond his normal day to day life - including the strange woman in his living room. His work was consistently at the top of the field and A STIR OF ECHOES is no exception. Matheson always did have a way with blending the mundane job of living a working life with the supernatural forces that might swirl just beyond perception and will rush in given a chance.
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