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A review by saroz162
The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories by Price Day, Lynn A. Venable, Lewis Padgett, Jerome Bixby, Paul W. Fairman, Charles Beaumont, Manly Wade Wellman, Carol Serling, Anne Serling-Sutton, Richard Matheson, Charles G. Waugh, Ambrose Bierce, Damon Knight, Martin H. Greenberg, Ray Bradbury, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Slesar
4.0
I've been kicking this collection around for twenty years or more, since the days when, as a teenager, I used to watch the Sci-Fi Channel's daytime hour block of Twilight Zone repeats with my mom at lunch. The surprise for me isn't that I went looking for the older stories the 1960s episodes were based on; that's very much in keeping with my reading habits in my late teens. What's surprising is that I never read them.
I think it might be partly because I'd already read and shrugged off one of Anne Serling-Sutton's collections novelizing her father's teleplays. They were reasonable stories, but they weren't anything special; they were more like videos for the age before video. It's an unfortunate if somewhat understandable decision that the editors chose to open this book - subtitled, after all, The Original Stories - with one of Serling-Sutton's after-the-fact efforts. It doesn't help that it's not a very good tale ("One for the Angels") on paper without the charm of the actors' performances. I remember reading that one story, and I suspect that put me off the entire collection.
That's too bad, because what's here is largely very good. There are thirty stories in the collection, and only two are Serling-Sutton's efforts. Most of the rest would count as "the original stories" by anyone's definition. Among these are Lynn A. Venable's "Time Enough at Last" and Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life," both excellent and considerably darker than the televised adaptations; you could publish Bixby's today. Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" is a little more thinly drawn, and it's easier to guess the twist than in the TV episode, but it's still fun to feel the penny drop. I personally think Rod Serling's adaptation improved on C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "What You Need," but it's interesting to see the same basic bones of story in very, very different clothes.
Of the remainder, eight stories each are by Twilight Zone stalwarts Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Most of these are stories they wrote in the '50s, although one or two publication dates make me wonder if they were either adapted from script to prose (or possibly simultaneously submitted). In general, Matheson is the more variable writer. Although he is rightly lauded as a screenwriter, some of Matheson's prose stories feel like teleplays with "he said" and "she said" bolted on. "Third from the Sun" is particularly thin, which is disappointing. Others, like "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "Steel," reveal some wonderfully tense internal character work. I suspect his strength was in depicting emotion - ratcheting tension, crushing despair - as opposed to dense narrative.
Beaumont comes across as a slightly more traditional narrative writer, although his stories don't always pop like Matheson's. They also don't always stick the landing. There's a lot to be said for the overall tone of "The Howling Man" or "Song for a Lady," but you can see the endings coming at quite a distance, and they aren't especially clever. His best contribution here is probably "Elegy"; it's short, it's snappy, and realization dawns for the reader just a step ahead of the characters involved.
Only one final story requires a disclaimer, and that's Ray Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric," which - God help me - is simply operating on an entirely different level from almost anything else in the entire anthology. It's true love-it or hate-it stuff, and having not read any Bradbury in a few years, it slammed my face into the wall and reminded me why he's a legend. It also happens to be the other "fake" in the collection, because it's obvious Bradbury took a semi-failed teleplay and improved it as short story most of a decade later. I don't mind - if you're going to break your collection's rules, let it be for something this good.
This is, ultimately, a very strong collection of classic "twist ending" speculative fiction, most of it from the 1950s or early 1960s. It stands up proudly alongside any anthology of contemporaneous material, and better than most of the ones Greenberg and Waugh edited in the '80s. Even if you only get it for a half-dozen of the stories, it's still well worth picking up.
I think it might be partly because I'd already read and shrugged off one of Anne Serling-Sutton's collections novelizing her father's teleplays. They were reasonable stories, but they weren't anything special; they were more like videos for the age before video. It's an unfortunate if somewhat understandable decision that the editors chose to open this book - subtitled, after all, The Original Stories - with one of Serling-Sutton's after-the-fact efforts. It doesn't help that it's not a very good tale ("One for the Angels") on paper without the charm of the actors' performances. I remember reading that one story, and I suspect that put me off the entire collection.
That's too bad, because what's here is largely very good. There are thirty stories in the collection, and only two are Serling-Sutton's efforts. Most of the rest would count as "the original stories" by anyone's definition. Among these are Lynn A. Venable's "Time Enough at Last" and Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life," both excellent and considerably darker than the televised adaptations; you could publish Bixby's today. Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" is a little more thinly drawn, and it's easier to guess the twist than in the TV episode, but it's still fun to feel the penny drop. I personally think Rod Serling's adaptation improved on C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "What You Need," but it's interesting to see the same basic bones of story in very, very different clothes.
Of the remainder, eight stories each are by Twilight Zone stalwarts Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Most of these are stories they wrote in the '50s, although one or two publication dates make me wonder if they were either adapted from script to prose (or possibly simultaneously submitted). In general, Matheson is the more variable writer. Although he is rightly lauded as a screenwriter, some of Matheson's prose stories feel like teleplays with "he said" and "she said" bolted on. "Third from the Sun" is particularly thin, which is disappointing. Others, like "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "Steel," reveal some wonderfully tense internal character work. I suspect his strength was in depicting emotion - ratcheting tension, crushing despair - as opposed to dense narrative.
Beaumont comes across as a slightly more traditional narrative writer, although his stories don't always pop like Matheson's. They also don't always stick the landing. There's a lot to be said for the overall tone of "The Howling Man" or "Song for a Lady," but you can see the endings coming at quite a distance, and they aren't especially clever. His best contribution here is probably "Elegy"; it's short, it's snappy, and realization dawns for the reader just a step ahead of the characters involved.
Only one final story requires a disclaimer, and that's Ray Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric," which - God help me - is simply operating on an entirely different level from almost anything else in the entire anthology. It's true love-it or hate-it stuff, and having not read any Bradbury in a few years, it slammed my face into the wall and reminded me why he's a legend. It also happens to be the other "fake" in the collection, because it's obvious Bradbury took a semi-failed teleplay and improved it as short story most of a decade later. I don't mind - if you're going to break your collection's rules, let it be for something this good.
This is, ultimately, a very strong collection of classic "twist ending" speculative fiction, most of it from the 1950s or early 1960s. It stands up proudly alongside any anthology of contemporaneous material, and better than most of the ones Greenberg and Waugh edited in the '80s. Even if you only get it for a half-dozen of the stories, it's still well worth picking up.