The Twilight Zone

Book review: Twilight Zone Anthology

The Twilight Zone Anthology (2009) is a collection of 19 short stories commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the original The Twilight Zone TV series. Each story is book-ended by a paragraph that simulates Serling’s introductory segments and closing narration from the show. You’ll have to imagine him standing there, head cocked at that familiar angle, cigarette burning away in his hand. The effect is perhaps not as successful in print format.

As expected with most collections the quality of the writing varies, though there are no real stinkers like in Poe’s Children, my most hated anthology of all time.

It opens with a bizarre story set during World War II where a soldier suffers delusions and/or tells stories to his compatriots as shells rings out around them. Making it even more bizarre is the rather inept formatting of the different segments, a sadly common occurrence in ebooks. One day publishers will realize that ebooks do in fact need to be handled differently when it comes to formatting. Anyway, I’m going to spoil the twist of “Genesis” in the spoiler text below:

[spoiler title=”Genesis spoiler”]It turns the protagonist is Serling himself, telling stories that will later form episodes of the series.[/spoiler] The twist is cute but the story is curiously bland and could have been excised from the collection.

“A Haunted House of Her Own” is a nice modern ghost story variation with bonus revenge fantasy and twist included, though a few parts of the setup are a bit too convenient (almost inevitable, really).

“On the Road” is one of the standouts, where two hitchhikers from 1970 meet again through happenstance decades later. It’s a story that is sweet without being sentimental.

“Puowaina”, set in Hawaii prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, is a vivid tale of premonition and inevitability.

Whitley Strieber’s “The Good Neighbor” is a nightmarish story of revenge by fire, with alien weirdness tossed in. Whether you believe he’s had contact with “visitors” or not, there’s clearly something fuelling his disturbing depictions on the subject.

Many of the other stories are perfunctory, inoffensive but not particularly memorable. “The Wrong Room”, for example, has a tragic twist that doesn’t resonate because the setup for it is simply too much to swallow, a neat concept that fails its own ambitions.

Overall this was a nice collection. I don’t mean “nice” in a dismissive way. Most of the stories are good and worth reading but I wasn’t compelled to immediately grab the follow-up to the anthology. I may eventually, because speculative fiction is not one of the better-served niches in short story format.

The Twilight Zone ‘I’m a jerk’ episodes

I’ve been watching the original run of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) the last few months and recall that Rod Serling once divided up the episodes as pretty good, average and crappy in equal quantities. I think he was being unduly harsh as the number of outright clunkers is pretty low. Weirdly I managed to watch two back-to-back tonight and they both shared the same problem.

The first is What’s in the Box which is about a bickering couple, a weird TV and a creepy TV repairman. The husband watches on channel 10 as he sees himself fight with his wife, punch her out the window to her death, go on trial and then go to the electric chair for her murder. It’s like personalized reality TV. As one would expect, the all-knowing TV is correct and all the events it depicts happens. The episode ends with the TV repairman (Sterling Holloway, the voice of Winnie the Pooh) breaking the fourth wall by looking at the camera with a big ol’ smirk.

The problem here is none of these characters are likable. He’s a bastard, she’s a harpy and you really don’t care what happens to them. The framing device of the TV repairman giving them their just desserts isn’t fleshed out enough to resonate so it’s just 20+ minutes of bickering, weirdness and then BAM, out the window! This may be a rare case where an hour long episode would have worked better.

The next episode is Spur of the Moment, a fairly ridiculous effort from the otherwise reliable Richard Matheson. Here it seems he came up with a pun-tastic title then tried to hang some kind of story on it so we get a young woman on a horse being chased by a scary older woman dressed all in black, complete with black cape. As the story unfolds we discover that the black-caped lady is the woman’s older self trying to warn her younger self not to marry the guy without the bow tie. You see, the younger woman is all set to marry a nice man with a bow tie but is still in love with a ne’er-do-well who doesn’t wear a bow tie. He is also blond and you know that means trouble. The episode shifts back and forth between 1939 and the present (1964) with older lady realizing she was seeing her younger self but forever being unable to catch up to her. Possibly because if you’re going to warn something it’s best not to dress up like a cartoon villain, pose like a vampire and screech incoherently and charge at the person you’re trying to warn as if you are trying to kill her.

Seriously, if you saw her approaching, would you wait for what she had to say?

Diana Hyland plays the woman and chews the scenery throughout but especially as the older woman (she was 28 at the time), though the script greases the way for her, employing the subtlety of a jackhammer, right down to her character explaining everything that is happening and or has happened. Exposition ahoy! Apart from the nerd with the bow tie, everyone in the story is a loser, so you’re left wondering why you should give a flying fig about what happens to them. I don’t need a character to be virtuous or even all that likable but there has to either be something that lets me connect to them in order to to sympathize with their plight or the plight better be awe-inspiring in its scope so I can just enjoy the spectacle.

Here we just have a spoiled brat blaming her dead dad for being so screwed up and whose idea to warn someone is to act like someone auditioning for the part of The Wicked Witch of the (Wild) West. And they sped up the film in the horse chase scene to make them look like they were riding really fast. Convincing!

Anyway, it was odd that I ended up watching two bad episodes back-to-back, so I thought it was worth reflecting on why they stunk.