You are traveling through a world of print and wonder, a tribute to the human strength of emotion and imagination, a world of transformed memories and expectations blown askew. Look, there’s a book cover up ahead. You’re entering The Twilight Zone. Case in point, an aging university professor and writer whose volumes have disappeared from even the dusty shelves of remaindered merchandise, a baby boomer whose first experience with fantasy and science-fiction was the black and white images on a misshapen television tube, has decided it is time to revisit a past that never was and in spite of the impossibility, reclaim it. Stories of dreams gone wrong and desires gone sour form the warp and woof of a supernatural tapestry where the ordinary doesn’t mean what you thought it meant. Yes, although I’ve seen the episodes from The Twilight Zone which were adapted into short stories for this anthology (we usually see the media adaptation flow going the other way), I very much enjoyed experiencing them in a new medium. I had forgotten the story of the robotic pitcher who, like the Tin Man in Oz, was given a heart. But, unlike the Tin Man’s surrogate heart, this heart has consequences. I well remember the story of an escape clause, the typical deal with the devil story, where the escape clause becomes similar to the title of a Jean-Paul Sartre play, “No Exit.” The narrative version of the episode called “Walking Distance” was vivid when I saw it on television (rather recently on Netflix, as a matter of fact) and reminded me of why one cannot go home again (and though I’m happy to have lived through my childhood and adolescence as I did and where I did, I have no desire to go back). There is even a retelling of “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” that Cold War expression of how we can become our own worst enemies, how someone assumed to be human may well be quite alien to humanity. I hope that doesn’t spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read it or seen the television episode. The beauty of these narrative versions of the television episodes is that each story ends with a transcript of the voice-over epilogue for each episode. To remind readers of how fabulous some of these epilogues were, I share one of the most profound from the anthology. “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fall-out. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices—to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fall-out all of its own for the children…and the children yet unborn. (a pause) And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confided to … The Twilight Zone! FADE TO BLACK” (p. 151)
Do You like book Stories From The Twilight Zone (1989)?
