February 13 - "Dance of the Dead"

“Dance of the Dead”
by Richard Matheson
I Am Legend (1995)

* (Eh) Science Fiction

Peggy learns the danger of new friends as the group of twentysomethings speed toward St. Louis and the loopy’s dance. Her mother’s warnings ringing in her head, Peggy finds more than she anticipated as she observes a loopy twist and jitter firsthand.

The story’s only saving grace is that the characters seem real enough. Not that I particularly care for them, but I believe they could exist only because I’ve met people like them before. They were annoying in real life as well.

I struggled to get a handle on the prose; this was once again a story of stilted, fragmented sentences (see “Witch War”) that simply didn’t work for me. The futuristic slang and obsession with Popeye cartoons did little to keep my attention. Even the supposedly scary scene with the loopy – the dancing lifeless undead – staggering across the stage did little more than make me twitch in disinterest. Written in 1954, this is a story I wish I’d have left buried out there in the world of weak stories.