THE BEARDLESS WARRIORS
by Richard Matheson
The legendary Matheson (author of the seminal vampire novel I Am Legend, 1954, and 1978’s now beloved astral novel What Dreams May Come) brings back his 1960s war novel about very young US soldiers fighting across Europe in the waning days of the WWII campaign. As in All Quiet on the Western Front, everything that happens to Hackermeyer, the new man in Company C, happens to us, including skull-crushing bursts of swarming shrapnel and emotional shards that slash and slice everywhere. It’s the kind of a war where you yearn for a broken leg to get you out of it. The dogs of war sink their teeth into you and start tearing. Harshly unsentimental all the way.