To whom it may concern

Une poignée de nouvelles aussi originales que percutantes a, dans la seconde moitié des années cinquante, révélé Richard Matheson au lectorat français. La plus connue est sans nul doute le célèbre « Journal d'un monstre », adaptée autant que traduite, et publiée en 1955 dans la revue Fiction. Ce classique, s'il en est, a été repris dans au moins sept anthologies et fut même édité sous la forme d'un élégant petit livre aux éditions Tchou (1988). La publication dans la très littéraire collection « Présence du Futur » de Je suis une légende (1955) puis de L'Homme qui rétrécit (1957), fait rapidement du nouvelliste incisif un romancier à succès, aussi à l’aise dans la Science-fiction que dans le Fantastique.

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At this stage, Matheson appears to have sowed clues in a number of texts, in order to connect them to each other, gradually constituting a personal mythology centered on the city of Fort, Indiana.
The unfortunate hero of "Mad House" is a professor of letters at Fort College - while the hero of "SRL AD" is a student of astronomy. The latter describes Fort College as "an institution subsidized by an old con to the aces who became infatuated with the prose of Charles Fort. "
It is clear that curious things happen on this campus very ... forteen - as the name suggests! In Mad House, reference is made to some parapsychological research conducted by a colleague of the main character. It would be no wonder that Robert Wade is also a professor on the same campus - at the head of a team working on the journey through time.
The elaboration of such a personal mythology, with recurring characters and places, used in independent texts but interspersed with cross-references, is a magnificent literary project. But it generally goes far beyond the understanding of French specialized criticism, which is often very narrow, which has the deplorable reflex to see in it a way of concealing a lack of imagination. So it's the other way around! Critics often report on authors' own failures and mistakes - it is not for nothing that they are often rightly regarded as failed writers, self-legitimizing their pitiful existence on the backs of the authentically desperate Creators. Creating "his" city is nevertheless a natural exercise in the classic American SF.
It was an amusing coincidence that the nineteenth episode of the Eerie series, Indiana (Marshall and Simon in French), was once again in Indiana, in the small town of Eerie, Joe Dante. The world is small, is not it? And chance often ... objective!