The Funeral - Richard Matheson

            Having just read I Am Legend, I could scarcely believe The Funeral was by the same author. I’m glad my first experience with Matheson was I Am Legend, because had it been The Funeral, I don’t think I would’ve known what to think. I saw almost every writing ‘rule’ that has been tormenting me since the beginning of my graduate study in writing, beaten, broken, gutted, stuffed and put on display. The writing was ludicrous, and yet still somehow effective. Perhaps it is because I went into the story knowing Matheson as an accomplished writer who could actually write, or perhaps it was effective because it was a comedy, and nod toward the nostalgic Universal Studios Monsters, I will never know. It was the literary version of the gloriously campy episodes of The X-Files and Supernatural.

            The Funeral goes a long way to showing how forgiving readers will be about the things they are fond of, and how fondness and nostalgia itself can be so transformative. Monsters like Dracula and the Wolfman began their lives as something genuinely terrifying. New things are always scary, because they are unknown, and it is human nature to fear what we don’t understand. But through constant exposure and adaptation the frightening becomes the fascinating, and fascination becomes familiarity, and familiarity becomes fondness. Now we can pull a chair up to the service of our beloved monsters of yesterday and have a good laugh and a good time with them, because we know them like family.

            Unfortunately for Morton Silkline, his universe is not so familiar with our beloved monsters, and his verbose terror and dread make for some intensely funny irony. In fact, Silkline himself fails to recognize that he is a character trope; the greedy funerary service provider, profiting from loss. Though there is nothing actually funny about the grossly profitable business of death and mourning, we can laugh at this funeral, because no one is actually dead or mourning, the miser is the fool, and money is a nonissue for the client.

            It’s not all fun and games though; I found an actually thoughtful moment with Asper’s musing over his lack of a proper send off. People have a pervasive belief that their funeral service is somehow reflective of how they were regarded in life, Asper does. This is the belief that makes the business of grief so profitable, yet when the actual service begins and rapidly goes to hell in a hand basket, it is because none of the guests particularly cared about the service. Actual funerals, are for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for the people in attendance, not the body in the casket. If the body were the only one who cared, well, there would be one less global industry.

            It makes you think of the exact way we are conditioned to think of death and dying, and of the constructs in place to help us mourn. The dead don’t care. Fancy caskets, lovely flowers, and stirring speeches are things the living do to feel like they can do something about the death of their loved one. That tiny illusion of power works wonders for the grieving process. It matters less that our loved one is completely beyond our reach if we feel like we can do that one last thing right by them, out of love. When we lay the body in the ground we tell our loved ones they are at rest, but rest is what we seek in that action. People need their illusions, funerals supply them, it’s very human, something Matheson’s monsters are not.