Rod Serling’s Night Gallery 2

Spine-tingling new tales of the mysterious and macabre- from the famous television series…

I’ve noted before that one of the holdovers from my childhood habits is associating summer vacation reading with movie and TV novelizations, the ultimate antidote to assigned schoolwork, and the perfect synergy between literature and media junk food.

This copy comes to me as a discard from the Waterloo High School Library- one of the many towns in New York’s Finger Lakes region, home and final resting place of Rod Serling, where his legacy remains alive and well.

We looked at the first Night Gallery anthology in 2022, and this is the second volume of short stories based on Serling’s follow up to The Twilight Zone. I mentioned then and will reiterate now, that I have not been able to get into Night Gallery as a TV series- the episodes seem padded-out, the production values look cheap, and the format is just strange. Originally scheduled as a “wheel” series, in which it would appear in rotation with three other shows on a weekly basis, the 60-minute running time could contain one story or two or more stories, including some that are brief comedic blackout sketches.

Serling lacked the creative control he had on The Twilight Zone, and NBC seemed to regard him mainly as a celebrity host for the series. Serling was also a notorious workaholic, so I assumed that part of the lack of quality was simply burnout… but I am actually now inclined to put the blame for Night Gallery’s creative failure squarely on the network, because most of these five stories are pretty terrific.

Mind you, there are a lot of Serling’s favorite tropes featured- dating back to the beginning of his TV career, he was dealing with aging palooka prizefighters, weary lady-social workers, pleas for racial and religious tolerance, hard bitten criminals speaking flowery noir patois, 36-year-old executives on the verge of a nervous breakdown, sentimental old men and young children, and references to upstate New York. Many of which figure into the stories in this anthology, which is largely successful even when re-treading his earlier work.

“Collector’s Items”: I am going to open with the caveat that I have not seen any of the episodes (all from season 2 and 3) that these stories were adapted from/into. A cursory look around online indicates that several of these stories appeared under different titles on TV, and at least one was completely overhauled by the time it was filmed.

This one aired under the title “Rare Objects” and stared Mickey Rooney as an aging mafia hit man who narrowly escapes an attempt on his own life. One of my main complaints about the TV series is that each episode (or segment) is front-loaded with a lot of business that has nothing to do with the eventual plot. This is definitely the case with the short story version, which I think is the weakest in the anthology.

Augie Kolodney is dining at his favorite restaurant, but remains vigilant and starts adding up a number of people acting oddly around him: the empty dining room on what should be a busy weekend, the nervous waiter who he’s never seen before but knows his name and keeps plying him with free food, the disappearance of his bodyguards from out front. So, when the rival assassin bursts out of the kitchen, Augie is ready for him, jumping out of the plate glass window, and into a cab to his uptown apartment. On the way he contemplates all of the associates who must have been in on the hit, including his girlfriend, who suddenly came down with a headache before dinner.

Augie finds his girl, Molly, at the apartment, and shares his suspicions that everyone including her was in on the plot. He ultimately shows her mercy, ordering her to get out of town, and she’s eager to go:

“I may not get points for the sell-out, but let me tell you something, Augie- I should get some points for hanging around as long as I did. Being around you is like walking around a cemetery.”

Augie calls upon Tony, his most loyal associate (although Augie is starting to grow suspicious even of him) to take him to a less-scrupulous, cash-only doctor to fix up his injuries, but he’s unsure where to turn next, having been betrayed by everyone he knows. But the doctor has an idea- he can put him in touch with a colleague who can offer him… protection. When Augie overhears even Tony scheming against him, he realizes he has no choice.

Traveling to Vermont, Augie arrives at the estate of the erudite Dr. Glendon, who, over the rarest of fine wines, explains that he is a collector of rare and one-of-a-kind objects.

Too late Augie realizes that the wine was drugged, and he has become Glendon’ latest acquisition, as he is lead to a cell block where he observes his fellow objet d’art: Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, Michael Rockefeller (big shout out to Lost… And Never Found!), and of course his prize possession- HITLER!

Which is how we go from “Requiem for a Hit Man” to “We Saved Hitler’s Brain” in less than 40 pages.

“The Messiah on Mott Street”: Serling is working in full lovable old people-and-children mode, but I can’t be annoyed! It somehow works without being cloying!

In a real throwback of a Lower East Side tenement, elderly Abe Goldman (played by Edward G. Robinson in the episode)  is struggling to provide for his orphaned grandson, Mikey, even as he receives news from Dr. Levine that his pneumonia is serious and from Child Welfare agent Miss Moretti that his guardianship is in jeopardy.

Goldman assures them (as he has for years) that his brother is due to repay a loan any day now (even though Miss Moretti reveals to that the brother is in a charity home in California) and promises he’ll soon be on the mend. After dismissing them, Goldman reassures Mikey with old country-style tales about how The Messiah is due any time now to grant every wish to the impoverished Jews of the Lower East Side. Goldman promises tons of ice cream and freight trains full of toys, but Mikey reveals his real dearest wish: that the Giants return to New York.

But where a literal messiah exists, also exists a literal Angel of Death, who lurks just outside Goldman’s window. Still-feisty, Goldman orders him out of his room and “down to Argentina and look for Hitler!” but is clear that his time is near.

When his grandfather’s condition takes a turn for the worse late one night, Mikey decides to take matters into his own hands, sneaking out to find the messiah himself. On Mott Street he finds first a drunk Salvation Army Santa Claus, and then a religious nut, before being recused by Buckman, a large Black man in an Army jacket, who returns him home, where Dr. Levine is tending to Goldman on his deathbed. Buckman urges Dr. Levine to allow Mikey to go to his grandfather, and Dr. Levine finally vents all of his frustrations:

“We’re mystics and believers and children to our dying days. And that applies to ancient doomed men, ineffectual doctors and nine-year-old boys. A convocation of desperate losers who have this illusion that God favors the tenements.”

But for once, just after midnight on Christmas day, the tenement gets its miracle: Goldman wakes up in good health, just as he and Mikey and Dr. Levine remember there was a fourth person in the apartment… or was there? By morning all memory of the visitor has faded and is completely forgotten when Dr. Levine answers the door for a special delivery letter which (double miracle!) contains a check from Abe’s brother for $10,000, having sold the property that Abe lent him the money to buy.

Dr. Levine leaves the apartment, cheerfully exchanging holiday greetings with the mailman out on the street… who seems a little familiar, but Levine doesn’t recognize the name on his nametag: Buckman.

“The Different Ones”: Any casual Twilight Zone fan will recognize this story as a re-do of “The Eye of the Beholder”, one of the most popular and beloved episodes of that series.

At some point in the future, Paul Koch and his wife struggle to figure out what to do with their severely deformed son, Victor, now 17 years old, whom they have kept hidden away in his bedroom. The family has increasingly become the target of neighborhood bullies, who stand outside and shout taunts at Victor until Paul goes and chases them off every evening.

Surgical options have failed, and although his wife is against it, Paul recognizes that as they get older, they are becoming less able to care for their son. In desperation Paul makes a video-call to the government agency “that is involved in population” (although we have video phones in the future, we still have to use directory assistance!)

Paul finally reaches the office of Special Urban Problems where a harried bureaucrat tries to direct him, until Victor pushes his father off-camera, showing himself to the agency as an “Ugly, ugly, ugly, bird-head, freak, freak, freak.”

Some time later, Paul goes in person to try and get his son a placement in a group home, noting that despite his appearance he is highly intelligent and generally good natured. The government official reports that no institution is capable of admitting him and suggests the only alternative is euthanasia, provided for under “The Federal Conformity Act of 1993.”

But wait, maybe there is an alternative… perhaps Victor can be sent as a part of a sort of inter-planetary exchange student program. There is a recently discovered planet, a “tiny little world just beyond Mars” that is “seriously underpopulated” and not too picky about who wants to come. Wait, are we talking about Earth? No, we are on Earth, as the official explains that it is:

“One-fiftieth the size of Earth. But its atmosphere is almost identical. Its people are humanoid. Reasonably technologically advanced.”

Paul breaks the news to his son, worried that when presented with these options that he’ll commit suicide. But Victor is up for exchange, ready to leave his barren room, which will stand devoid of the mementos of the usual teenage years, leaving his parents to worry and vowing to pray the alien world will treat him like a human being.

After his journey, Victor disembarks from the spaceship down the jetway (spaceway?) and encounters an average looking teenager- Victor asks if he’s the “welcome committee”, but is told no, he’s the exchange student heading back to earth in his place- and boy, he can’t wait, he’s on been on the waiting list his whole life!

At the end of the ramp, Victor finds the delegation of teenagers sent to welcome him- and of course, they are all cone-headed bird-faced freaks like himself, delighted to welcome Victor to his new home.

Both “Messiah” and “The Different Ones” rate among Serling’s most sentimental stories, and are criticized for being treacly- but at least in the short story version, they work for me, and he cuts the saccharine with genuinely witty observations – I especially like one of the teenage girls meeting the newly arrived Victor and swooning that’s “he’s so beautiful!” while her friend warns her to play it cool. There is also a nice moment in “Messiah” where Dr. Levine wishes Miss Moretti Merry Christmas, and she returns with a wry-but-sincere “Happy Hanukkah.”

So, maybe we could use some wholesome sweetness and light right now. Especially considering the last two stories in the collection take an uncharacteristically dark and depressing view of humanity.

“Lindemann’s Catch”: The Bedford Village Inn, a waterfront dive in a town dependent on the fishing industry is terrorized by Captain Lindemann, a bully prone to taking frustrations out on the patrons, especially Suggs, the local drunk who claims to be a fortune teller and mystic.

Lindemann is in an especially foul mood after a bad night at sea, and is slapping Suggs around in the bar when word comes from his crew to get down to the ship right away- initially enraged to hear that one more thing has gone wrong, he is as startled as the rest of the town to see that along with the pitiful catch, Lindemann’s crew has also netted something strange:

Through the mesh of the net there was a woman’s face- white, cold, the lips a shade of purple, but the face was incredibly alive and also incredibly beautiful… protruding out of the net on the other side was the lower half of the woman’s body- a long, fin-tailed protuberance that flapped weakly from side to side.

Lindemann orders the crew to kill the creature- but they refuse, arguing that she is part woman. Eventually it’s suggested that they can sell the creature to a sideshow or exhibit her themselves for money. As the night goes on, Lindemann seems to become fascinated with her, eventually binding her up and taking her below deck to his quarters.

Days later the crew reports that Lindemann refuses to leave his quarters or let anybody see the creature. Lindemann does eventually summon the town doctor and confides in him that the creature seems to be getting weaker and weaker, and he is also able to communicate with her telepathically. He begs the doctor to treat her, but he responds that there is nothing he can do and Lindemann should return her to the sea.

Suggs has been skulking around and learns of Lindemann’s plight, correctly figuring that he has fallen in love with the creature. Suggs offers Lindemann a “potion” that he says will cure her and “change a half-woman into a whole woman.”

Lindemann accepts the potion and gives it to the creature, who drinks it down eagerly. And before the eyes of Lindemann and whole town, the mermaid turns into a reverse-mermaid (human legs, fish head) and takes the opportunity with her new legs to run away from Lindemann and jump off the side of the ship, returning to the sea, leaving Lindemann bereft and Suggs having gotten his revenge.

“The Suggestion”:  The shortest story in the volume, it was apparently extensively reworked for the TV show, where it aired in season 3 under the new 30-minute, single-story format as “Finnegan’s Flight”. 

Told in the first person, it describes a cocktail party given by Lucille Novotny, a dumpy office worker, for her colleagues, who only attend because they both don’t want to hurt her feelings and know they can make fun of her later. Serling’s characterization is uncharacteristically gross:

“A gushy, really unpalatable broad who had come from upstate New York direct from an across-the-tracks Polish community in a small town, obviously planning to spend the rest of her life trying to over-compensate for the humbleness of the beginning.”

Also present at the party is dorky Harvey Hemple, a would-be lothario and butt of office jokes, observed trying to chat up a glamorous colleague,

“Miserably, humiliatingly conscious that he looked and sounded like an impotent poodle trying to make it with a St. Bernard.”

Jeez, Rod!

Lucille suggests to the narrator that he show off his hypnosis party tricks, and Harvey is eager to volunteer to be the subject. Harvey proves to be exceptionally suggestable and is soon crawling around and enacting every pantomime the narrator suggests to him. The narrator starts to have second thoughts when the assembled crowd demands more humiliating stunts, (and seem especially enthusiastic about getting Harvey to take off his clothes). Instead, the narrator instructs Harvey to enact his greatest fantasy and Harvey obliges the crowd by acting out, to the most minute detail, preparing for takeoff and piloting a jet plane. But things get out of control when his fantasy runs into trouble, and before the horrified onlookers Harvey panics, and suddenly catches fire and explodes before their eyes.

The narrator reports that the police report states that Harvey’s death was “suicide by self-immolation” but the whole office knows the truth: Harvey was such a loser that even in his fantasy life he crashed the plane.