7 Steps to Midnight

by Richard Matheson

An interesting setup and a pretty dull book. The setup: Chris Barton, a mathematician working on an important government project, falls asleep at his desk. He wakes up around 3am, walks to the parking lot, and finds that his car is missing. He borrws a car from a security guard and heads home.

On the way, he sees an old man hitchhiking and picks him up – this is in the Arizona desert, and he feels obligated to. The man engages him in a weird, unwelcome conversation about the nature of reality, and he makes a wager with him: “I wager the security of your existence against your ability to tell what’s real and unreal in your life.” Chris is annoyed and accepts the wager to get the man to shut up.

But then things get weird. He arrives home, and his car is already there. A man and woman are in the house. The man’s name is Chris Barton, and the woman is his wife.

So begins a crazy story of unreality. Agents are chasing him. He ends up flying to London, where more agents either help or try to kill him. He meets the beautiful Alexsandra and falls in love with her. Etc., etc. Wherever he goes, someone keeps providing what he needs - a suitcase of clothes, a sack of spending money. “A most accommodating nightmare.” (162)

But after a while, it’s just pretty repetitive. Stuff keeps happening to him, and somehow he gets out of it thanks to the unseen hand of some benevolent force. Lots of close calls.

The book needed editing badly. There were several misspellings, missing letters in words. In an early scene, the back window of the car he’s driving is shot out. Later, someone has placed an envelope in the car, and he can’t imagine how they got in – it’s locked, and all the windows are rolled up.

The worst one is on p. 279, in the very last sentence of a chapter. Alexsandra is revealing that a painting that resembles her really is a painting of her. She ends the chapter by saying, “It is me, Robert.” Well, that’s great, but who the heck is Robert? His name is Chris! I’m guessing the author changed the name and forgot to fix it here.

It’s a little like PKD if he never did drugs and was kind of boring. A pointless episode of the Twilight Zone. There’s a countdown from 7 steps to midnight, but it only gets to 4 before the author gets tired of it and ends the book! The ending was okay, although I kind of saw it coming.

Vocab

• Quo vadis? - Where are you going? (53)
• enervated - weakened, enfeebled, drained of vitality (71)