A Child's Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities

A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities highlights three stories originally published in Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories, a speculative memoir by Elayne Zalis that explores how The Twilight Zone sparked her imagination when she was a child in Miami in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The young TV fan and the woman she becomes collaborate across space and time to reimagine their favorite episodes of the classic television series. While tapping into a shared memory bank, they retreat to a personal Twilight Zone that nurtures creativity and invention.

In contrast with the memoir, which covers a broad range of characters, the three intersecting stories in this abridged edition feature children and young adults in leading roles: “Beyond Our World” retells “Little Girl Lost” (March 1962) from the perspective of Abbey, a dimension-hopping young storyteller whom Zalis invented. “Invaders from Outer Space,” a remake of “Black Leather Jackets” (January 1964), brings together four child actors from different episodes of The Twilight Zone to save the planet. “Uncharted Waters,” the grand finale, takes “The Bewitchin’ Pool” (June 1964) to new depths after the author as an eleven-year-old girl discovers a magical underwater portal one summer in Miami Beach. Like the other youths in A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone, she imagines new possibilities. The latest volume in Zalis’s autobiographical quartet, A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone shifts the focus from speculative memoir to speculative fiction.