When Richard Matheson's horror anthology Nightmare At 20,000 Feet came out a year ago, it was a welcome renewal for a justly renowned author whose most classic works were nearly impossible to find outside used bookstores and dusty library shelves. While Matheson's novels continued to spawn film adaptations throughout the 1990s–notably Stir Of Echoes and What Dreams May Come–the stories that launched his career were far harder to find. A recent Matheson revival continues with Duel, an anthology that opens with and takes its title from the short story that inspired Steven Spielberg's breakout film of the same name. But "Duel," while gritty and relatively gripping, is still one of the blandest and least impressive of the book's 18 short stories. With the exception of "Duel," which was written for Playboy in 1971, the collection's other stories come from Matheson's glory days in the early '50s. His twist-ending tales often became episodes of The Twilight Zone and other likeminded anthology shows (Amazing Stories, Night Gallery); three of Duel's stories were adapted for The Twilight Zone, but virtually all of them share the show's offbeat O. Henry mentality. Matheson typically mixes a subtly repetitive, deliberately lulling writing style with sudden plot twists, a mixture of science-fiction and horror tropes, and deceptively simple characters and settings to produce grim, startling genre shockers that engage the intellect as well as the adrenal glands. At his best, though, he also mixes in humor and a loose, flavorful sense of language, as he does in "SRL Ad," a story about a drunken, lonely college student who answers a personals ad from a "lonesome Venus gal" seeking an "earthman of like fixtures." At his most ambitious, he even adds telling metaphors, as with "The Test," in which an anxious, guilty man waits, half-eagerly and half with horror, for his aging father to fail a mandatory competency test that will result in his state-sponsored execution. "Being" and "Shipshape Home" have their share of creepy aliens drooling over human flesh, but Matheson's real talent for horror emerges when he takes familiar situations to familiar extremes: Two of the book's most haunting stories simply deal with alienation and disassociation. "Trespass" plays on pregnancy anxiety, as a couple is driven apart by the alien behavior of the pregnant wife, while "Brother To The Machine" sets a confused and frightened free-thinker loose in an oppressive society that neither understands nor can tolerate his individuality. Like virtually all of Matheson's stories, each has a cleverly concealed turn at the end, but what makes him such an effective writer is the way he expands common anxieties into uncommon terrors.