There’s not a lot of things quite as entertaining as watching a person get hypnotized. It’s amazing what people will do when they don’t know they’re doing it.

Aside from being a nifty party trick, hypnosis is a rare look into someone else’s mind. All of their secrets and hidden thoughts are laid out to be seen.

But what would happen if the system reverses and the subject becomes the seer?

This question is tackled with an eerie reality in the Richard Matheson-penned “Stir of Echoes.” And yes, it is the same ghostly tale as the soon-to-be-released movie of the same name, starring Kevin Bacon.

It’s a wonder that this 1958 classic took such a long time getting to the theater, with the book having all the suspense and opportunity for special effects needed for a modern-day screenplay.

The story begins innocently enough, with everyday-guy Tom Wallace coming home from a normal day at work.

His wife, Anne, reminds him of a party they agreed to attend at Elsie’s, the next-door neighbor. They decide to invite Anne’s brother Phil along to liven up an expectedly boring event.

Phil does his best to fulfill his purpose by offering to hypnotize someone. After confessions of disbelief and unwillingness to be a subject, Tom is elected into the position.

Phil manages to hypnotize Tom, persuading him to act absurd in front of his friends and taking him back in his mind to his childhood.

When Phil announces, ‘”That’s it, brother man. It’s over,'” everyone, including Tom, believes him.

Famous last words.

That night, Tom has the first of many encounters with a ghostly woman who appears to him in the living room. Each night, Tom awakes in a sweat and knows that the woman is waiting for him.

Pretty soon, his visions and uncanny predictions about the people and the world around him begin to break up the Wallace marriage and make Tom question his sanity.

The more Tom’s psychic abilities increase, the less control he has over them.

“I was a wireless set open to all bands, my controller gone. No sure hand rested on the knobs, no observing eye saw when messages were coming in and warned me ahead of time. It was all blind; and, because blind, terrifying,” Matheson writes.

Soon, Tom begins to see through the randomness of the abnormal events surrounding him and a purpose becomes more and more clear.

He is overtaken with the need to solve the problem that is puzzling him from the grave.

Although dealing with an unrealistic premise, Matheson delivers even the most abnormal facts with a scary sense of realism.

The only author who compares to Matheson in the leave-the-lights-on suspense category is the long-gone and classic writer Edgar Allen Poe.

The movie version of “Stir of Echoes” will have a hard time surpassing the book, only because this story is perfect fare for the human imagination, and such ghostly events are depicted so well by Matheson, it’s hard to imagine it scarier, even with the help of the big screen.

“Stir of Echoes” will make you think twice about getting hypnotized.

Matheson writes, “I believe that every single human being is, from birth, endowed with varying degrees of psychic perceptivity — and needs only a touch to its mechanism to use this perceptivity in responding to experience.”

4 stars

Ratings based on a 5 stars scale.

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Kelsey Foutch is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Waterloo.