Deal Me In, Week 13 ~ “Dress of White Silk”

Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis

“Dress of White Silk” by Richard Matheson

Card picked: Nine of Diamonds
From: I Am Legend, and other stories

Thoughts: Our narrator is being punished, locked in her room by her grandmother. Her transgression? That’s hard to tell. It involves sneaking into her dead mother’s room with a playmate and showing off a dress that may not be as white and silky as we’re originally led to expect.

Writing in dialect or a child’s voice is hard to pull off. Matheson doesn’t quite manage it in this story. The changed conventions of grammar seem a little haphazard. When added on top of supernatural events, the effect is overly-muddled instead of unsettling.