I am a fan of the Twilight Zone and have been watching and rewatching since I was very young. Rod Serling was probably one of the first few names permanently branded on my brain. So, of course, when I found this book, I had to have it. Now, I have been trying to read solely horror novels and stories since 'tis the season but this one, like the original Twilight Zone TV series, the three stories within fit firmly in the Supernatural Thriller and Grim Thriller/Drama categories rather than straight horror. The stories mostly take their time with character work and at times, they build tension and suspense well but could still be pared down a bit. However, this is par for the course with Serling in my experience. A character-heavy story with a spare plot takes place in a fundamentally moral universe with a supernatural twist or twist of perspicacity at or near the end.
The stories spend a lot of time on characters, mostly to paint the bad guys with as many strokes of black as possible and, more interestingly, streaking their victims in shades of gray humanizing them to a greater extent and magnifying the antagonist’s crimes. The antagonists are given strokes of torture revealing their weaknesses more than anything else. They are truly monsters but still, only human evil that the unyielding cosmos will eventually punish severely.
The plot of each story is very, very simple: an escaped nazi war criminal in his attempt to escape imminent justice falls into a cosmic reckoning worse than death, a race-baiting preacher con-man responsible for inciting race riots and lynchings does his thing and crashes hard into supernatural justice, and a rich blind woman manipulates criminals and a destroyed ex-boxer to get what she wants for a mere 12-hours sowing nothing but devastation and death only to jump headlong into a torment rife with perspicacity which serves her just desserts. Again, this is par for the course.
I liked this book and all three stories as they were exactly what I expected. However, I found no surprises here either. I basically got what I was looking for, some Twilight Zone tales, and nothing more. I would recommend this book to fans of the Twilight Zone and of Serling’s other works but don’t expect anything beyond that. ( )