Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

In many ways, Finney's third level satisfies all the definitions of Serling's Twilight Zone , and in many ways it was Finney's concept that made Serling's concept possible. One of Finney's great abilities as a writer has been his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, across the line and into another world . . . as when a character, picking through his change, happens upon a dime which bears not the likeness of FDR but of Woodrow Wilson, or when another Finney character begins on a journey to the idyllic planet Verna as a passenger aboard a rickety old charter bus that is eventually parked in a tumbledown country barn ("Of Missing Persons"). Finney's most important accomplishment, which the best episodes of The Twilight Zone echo (and which the best of the post- Zone writers of fantasy have also echoed), is that Daliesque ability to create the fantasy . . . and then not apologize for it or explain it . It simply hangs there, fascinating and a little sickening, a mirage too real to dismiss: a brick floating over a refrigerator, a man eating a TV dinner full of eyeballs, kids on a toylittered floor playing with their pet dinosaur. If the fantasy seems real enough, Finney insisted, and Serling after him, we don't need any wires or mirrors. It was, in a large part, Finney and Serling who finally answered H. P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.

And yet Finney, who perhaps understood Serling's concept of "that middle ground between light and shadow" better than anyone else, was never represented on The Twilight Zone -not as a scriptwriter, not as a source. Serling later adapted Assault on a Queen (1966) , a work which can most humanely be characterized as unfortunate. It contains all the preachy, talking-heads stuff that brought so many of his Twilight Zone scripts low. It's one of the minor tragedies of the field that what might have been an inspired meeting of two like minds should have turned out so poorly. But if you feel disappointed with my analysis of The Twilight Zone (and some, I suspect, may feel that I have spat on an icon), I urge you to find a copy of Finney's The Third Level , which will show you what The Twilight Zone could have been.

And still, the program left us with a number of powerful memories, and Serling's analysis that a third of the shows were pretty damn good may not have been far from the mark.