FSF, March-April 2010 (6 page)

And speaking of comics, the second volume in Holly Black's story for Graphix is now out. As I mentioned in the review of the first volume, this graphic story has the same kind of setting as Black's YA novels—dark faeries interacting with counterculture teens—with the new medium giving it all a fresh spin.

Volume Two picks up where the first ended with the faerie world intruding more and more into our world until...well, it's vague echoes of Sarah Beth Durst's
Into the Wild
books, but I'm still intrigued with where it will go since Black writes such edgy faerie, and Durst was writing about fairy tale characters in general.

Black's really got her comic book pacing down now, and her plotting and dialogue have always been terrific.

Ted Naifeh's still not my favorite comic artist—mostly because there isn't a smooth storytelling flow from panel-to-panel—but I'm liking his work more with each book, and he certainly comes up with some great perspectives.

The Unknown
by Mark Waid & Minck Oosterveer, Boom! Studios, 2009, $24.99.

And still speaking of comics, one of the most intriguing series on the stands at the moment has come out with its first collection, bringing together issues one through four.

Catherine Allingham is considered to be the smartest person alive and the world's most famous—and successful—private investigator. Given six months to live because of a brain tumor, she decides to tackle the biggest mystery of all: what happens to us when we die?

The Unknown
doesn't fit any one genre—it's equal parts private eye mystery, dark fantasy, sf, and character study—but it's a terrific, continent-hopping story that had me eagerly awaiting each new issue as it hit the stands when it was first coming out. You don't have to do so, since the first arc is collected here for you, but after you've finished it, I don't doubt that you'll be eagerly awaiting each issue of the second arc as I do.

Waid's a thoughtful and inventive writer, with a good eye for detail, and he knows how to script an action scene when it's needed. Oosterveer provides moody art with an excellent cinematic flow and plenty of idiosyncratic touches that give the characters and settings a look that's all their own.

This isn't my favorite comic—I'm still a sucker for
Echo
and
Buffy Season Eight
—but it's right up there near the top of my list.

Forever Twilight: Darkness, Darkness
by Peter Crowther, PS Publishing/Drugstore Indian Press, 2009, UK 15 pounds.

This is an old-fashioned story written with a contemporary sensibility. Old-fashioned, because there's a slow build, with time taken for us to get to know the characters and setting before the real drama sets in. There's also a
mood
, an eerie, creeping air to the proceedings that you just don't get in modern stories, certainly not modern horror stories where it's one slash scene, then cut and zip on to the next one.

But it's written in a contemporary style—tight, third person points of view that really allow the reader into the head of the character. And while there's ample description, there's not too much, and a brisk pace keeps the story moving.

The setup is basic. Four people in a remote radio station realize that something has gone wrong in the nearby town. Upon investigation, they discover that everybody has disappeared—apparently right in the middle of whatever they happened to be doing at the time. When they start to come back, they're
changed
.

I know that doesn't sound too fresh, but Crowther makes it work. The zombie-like returnees are different from anything we've seen before, and the escalating tension will keep you reading right to the end of...well, the book. Not the story as a whole, since this is the first in a series of connected short novels. Or maybe a part of one long novel.

The conclusion offers a good break-off point in terms of the characters we've met thus far. The frustration comes from not knowing what happened to the returnees, of what's going to happen to the surviving characters.

For that we need to turn to book two.

That said, this was still a satisfying read on its own, and a nice change of pace for Crowther in terms of setting. And the packaging is terrific. Go check out the cover online. Whenever I see a scene such as the desolate, small-town Main Street depicted here, I just know I want to read the book.

Sometimes, the story doesn't hold up to the promise of the cover, but not this time.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute,
by Douglas Brode and Carol Serling, Barricade Books, 2009, $24.95.

Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone:
“
The After Hours,
” adapted by Mark Kneece from Rod Serling's original scripts, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs, Walker & Company, 2008, $16.99.

"
Walking Distance,
” adapted by Mark Kneece from Rod Serling's original scripts, illustrated by Dove McHargue, Walker & Company, 2008, $16.99.

Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary
, edited by Carol Serling, Tor Books, 2009, $14.99.

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade
by Jonathan Clements, Titan Books, 2008, $14.95.

"Mad Man"

It's been just over fifty years since
The Twilight Zone
debuted on CBS television, one of the most influential series in TV history and the first to consistently push the boundaries of censorship in episodes that dealt with racism, fascism, the costs of warfare, the social and cultural fallout of conformity, military mind control, nuclear destruction, advertising, union organization, and just about any hot-button topic you could name. Today, it's nearly impossible to imagine the entertainment landscape Rod Serling, the angry young man of broadcast TV, set to terraform with his groundbreaking work. Carol Serling, his widow and indefatigable keeper of the Serling flame, provides a glimpse in a 2009 interview published in
Cemetery Dance
magazine:

The censorship was intolerable. Foolish things like not allowing the Chrysler building to be shown on a NY skyline because Ford was sponsoring the show. You couldn't deal with gas for a certain episode about the Holocaust because the gas company was sponsoring the show! Rod wrote a script about the south and they took the Coke bottles off the table. A lot of it was ludicrous and foolish. He wrote a script about a young black man that was killed in the south. He felt very strongly about this, the sponsors got hold of it and told him he had to change the locale, the time of the script, etc. By the time the script went on, it was placed in the 1880s instead of 1950, in the southwest, and the victim was a Mexican kid. The whole thing was totally changed, and Rod said that by the time the script got on the air, the script had turned to dust.

Prior to
Twilight Zone
, Serling left an indelible mark on the Golden Age of live broadcasting with teleplays like “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” which featured legendary performances by Jack Palance and Ed Wynn, and “Patterns,” a chilling depiction of the corporate snakes and shaky career ladders that fill a Manhattan financier's office. The current hit series “Mad Men” owes a debt to Serling, and gave him a tip of the fedora in one episode.

A genuine visionary, Serling saw the medium's potential being squandered almost from the beginning. Early 1950s anthology series such as Texaco Star Theater, Fireside Theater, and Philco TV Playhouse featured works of gritty realism by writers such as Serling and Paddy Chayefksy (who famously observed that “Television is democracy at its ugliest"). By the end of the decade, the ratings success of live broadcasts had given way to that of sitcoms, quiz shows, talent searches.

And westerns—in the broadcast year ending October 1959, the month
The Twilight Zone
debuted, more than half of the top twenty-five shows featured gunslingers. Rod Serling had to hack his way through a lot of sagebrush to get his new series on the air.

With
The Twilight Zone
, Serling disarmed the American viewing public by presenting real-life issues in the guise of the fantastic, and deftly played on both the paranoia and nostalgia engendered by the Cold War Era. An avid reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Serling used genre storytelling as a stealth bomber to get his ideas past media censors and an audience hypnotized by the likes of Perry Como and Red Skelton. For the first season, he was contractually bound to write or adapt most of the episodes himself. But much of
The Twilight Zone
's success was due to Serling's choice of writers to pen the remainder of the scripts, in particular a cohort of L.A.-based authors known as The Group. Centered around the charismatic young Charles Beaumont (who tragically developed Alzheimer's when he was only thirty-four, and died four years layer), the Group was a Star Chamber of literary talent whose members included Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner Jr., William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson, and Jerry Sohl, among others. Christopher Conlon wrote an invaluable 1999 essay ("Southern California Sorcerors,” also published in
Cemetery Dance
) detailing the Group's history, integral to that of
The Twilight Zone
, especially in its early years. (Later associates included Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon.)

Almost none of this remarkable tale surfaces in
Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute
, a piece of hagiography that does little to illuminate Serling's genius or the enduring appeal of his most famous creation. A heavy smoker, Serling died far too young—in 1975 at the age of fifty, during cardiac surgery following a massive heart attack. Since then, Carol Serling has worked tirelessly to keep his name and accomplishments in the public eye; one measure of her success is the Rod Serling postage stamp, issued early in 2009. (There's also the new Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Walt Disney World.)

And while one can certainly appreciate the impulse behind the
50th Anniversary Tribute
, the end result is a bizarrely Rod-centric book,
Being John Malkovich
recast with Serling as the Alpha and Omega of TV. Douglas Brode (presumably the book's main author) has produced thirty works dealing with film and popular culture. Here he has the task of summing up the 92 episodes written by Serling, out of 151 episodes during the show's five-year-run—a remarkable achievement on Serling's part. Brode notes that the tribute does not profess to be an encyclopedic survey of the series, like Marc Scott Zicree's
The Twilight Zone Companion
. Rather, it's an attempt “to capture what we loved most about the best
Zones
, those that live on in what Jung tagged our ‘collective unconscious.'” The selection process seems to have been fairly streamlined, as most of the episodes summed up here were written or adapted by Serling himself. Fair enough, though the end result offers little in the way of enlightenment, beyond repeated reminders of Serling's genius.

Readers get fair warning of this: the second sentence of the book's introduction proclaims Rod Serling “the most imaginative of all American writers since Edgar Allan Poe."

Well, okay, if you say so. In fact, much of Serling's work was derivative, and there were several accusations of plagiarism leveled against him during the show's run, most notably by Ray Bradbury. These may not have exactly been beside the point (a few court rulings favored the plaintiffs), but the fact is that Serling was far from “the most imaginative” of American writers. Some of the program's most memorable episodes show the unmistakable influence of other works: “The After Hours” and John Collier's “Evening Primrose;” the brilliant “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery;” “The Hitch-Hiker” and Somerset Maugham's “The Appointment at Samarra” (itself a retelling of an older tale); “Cavender Is Coming” and
It's a Wonderful Life
(and Crockett Johnson's
Harold and the Purple Crayon
).

But in all of these, the synthesis of script, acting, and direction create something marvelous, “a miracle of rare device” (to quote Ray Bradbury quoting Samuel Coleridge, in a script that Serling turned down and which went on to become Bradbury's memorable story of that title). Serling's great gift was as an assimilator, not just of literature, film, and television, but of popular culture and social upheaval—and as an assimilator, he had the great good fortune to be at the helm of his own series during a perfect storm of pop culture and societal change. Much of his work was produced as a deliberate homage to people he admired—Alfred Hitchcock (in the
Tribute
, referred to repeatedly and annoyingly by the chummy sobriquet Hitch), Frank Capra, O. Henry. And the quality of both acting and writing is a powerful testament to how both can trump special effects when putting sf/f onscreen.

Sadly, there's too little examination of how this synergistic process worked for Serling and his collaborators. Instead, there's facile and occasionally sloppy commentary more suitable for Spark Notes.

Of “The Hitch-Hiker's” protagonist, stalked by Death: “Her fear is no longer vague, if fear is the correct term. More likely, it is anxiety."

Of “Two": “The time; perhaps a hundred years from now, or this may have already happened two million years ago.” As George Lucas would state at the beginning of
Star Wars
: “Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” [Um,
not
what Lucas stated.]

Other observations are simply maddeningly Rod-centric, especially when it comes to Hitchcock, who in Brode's account, anyway, seems to have cast a long shadow over Serling's work, including the names of some female characters. In “The After-Hours,” Ann Francis plays Marsha White, “yet another of Serling's attractive, Hitchcock-like ‘M’ women.” “A Passage for Trumpet” can't simply be an astute portrait of an alcoholic; it also must offer the chance to “learn more about the workings of an alcoholic's mind here than we do in J. P. Miller's ‘Days of Wine and Roses.'” There are several references to actors whose appearance and demeanor mirror Serling's own. And Brode just can't keep his hands off Serling's co-writers.