Most TWILIGHT ZONEs weren't very good; most of the better
ones were written by Charles Beaumont and to a lesser extent
by Matheson, but if one comes upon them as an adult, as you
did, Mike, with "Steel," they don't hold up very well.
Serling's tended to be particularly ham-handed...even if he
wasn't interested in hammering his points with a wrecking
ball, he just wrote too damned many too fast (as the recently
repeated PBS AMERICAN MASTERS episode about Serling
noted).
But, man, yes, Matheson is one of the great explorers of
paranoia in fiction...there's a story in one of the later
HITCHCOCK PRESENTS anthologies I need to look up again, about
a serial disruptor of small towns, that I need to find and
read again after decades. Notable to me, as well, is how BID
TIME RETURN has gotten him a sizable romance-fiction
readership, much of which also gravitate toward WHAT DREAMS
MAY COME...since he's also one of the several CF writers who
have also written some notable western fiction over the last
several decades, he's one of the most diversely-read writers
of our time, I suspect. Certainly he's all over the
chainstore bookshelves, in terms of his books, when they're
available, are in several pigeonhole cases. Some day I'll
have to reacquaint myself with how his first story, the
notable borderline-horror vignette "Born of Man and Woman,"
found its way to THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION.
TM
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