For years, it's been regrettably difficult to find Richard Matheson's classic short stories in print. There are a good number of them, too: Matheson has been writing prolifically since the early 1950s, and his many works have been adapted into such diverse films as The Incredible Shrinking Man, Somewhere In Time, Duel, The Omega Man, Stir Of Echoes, and What Dreams May Come. Often, his titles aren't immediately familiar, but the stories themselves are, from The Twilight Zone and cult schlockers like Trilogy Of Terror, if nothing else. "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet," the eponymous first entry in a new anthology of Matheson's horror stories, was adapted both for the original Twilight Zone television show and the 1983 movie. It gave birth to what may be Matheson's most memorable screen image: a horrified commercial-airline passenger, staring out at a malevolent gremlin destroying the wing of his plane. The book's other contents, which are mostly stories from the '50s, may be less familiar, but prove no less memorable—the malicious furniture in "Mad House," the history-haunted young protagonist in "Dress Of White Silk," and the disintegrating paranoiac in "Legion Of Plotters" are emotionally resonant enough to linger in the brain after the visceral shocks of their stories have faded. Some of Matheson's plots may seem clichéd 50 years after their conception: It's no longer surprising when bad things happen to people who move into a reputedly haunted house, or get waylaid in a spooky small town in the middle of the night. But the author's combination of bluntly economic language, Ray Bradbury-like poetic nostalgia, and razor-edged, macabre O. Henry-esque sensibilities add up to a potent package. At his best, in simple stories like "The Likeness Of Julie" (in which a young man is suddenly stricken by a desire to drug and rape a plain-featured, overlooked classmate), Matheson injects the usual bloody horror tales with a sense of restrained, calculated artistry and a realistic grounding that would prove a major influence on later horror-realists like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Robert R. McCammon. Bringing his work back into print helps acknowledge his debt to the modern horror story, but better yet, it permits renewed access to some of the most solid elements of the genre's foundation.