How I Got To Lovecraft Step Two: Rod Serling

Summers in the Mojave Desert suck.

 I’m not an outdoor person to begin with, but the combination of the blazing sun and rocket-hot asphalt…well, let’s just say I welcomed any excuse to stay inside. And every Fourth of July, the local Los Angeles station, KTLA, gave me the excuse I needed. The Twilight Zone marathon. I would sit for hours in my air-conditioned living room and lose myself in an alternate reality. Occasionally, my mother would kick me out for some much needed “fresh air and sunshine.” As soon as she wasn’t looking, I’d sneak back inside. Rod Serling’s world amazed me. A lot of The Twilight Zone is cliché now, but it’s cliché because so many people were influenced by it. It was ground-breaking at the time. I was fortunate. I was able to watch the series without spoilers. So when I found out the old woman being stalked by Martians was actually….well, I won’t give the twist away, even decades later!

 At this point in my life, I already explored Lovecraft. To be honest, he left me cold. There were a lot of reasons—his verbose style, his cold, fatalistic view of humanity, his over reliance on non-endings. People in his world often didn’t know how they lived to tell the tale. In their blind rush to escape, they forgot the details.

Rod Serling & His Faithful Typewriter

Rod Serling changed my relationship with Lovecraft.

After The Twilight Zone, I moved on to Serling’s next series, Night Gallery. I was in college, working on my doctorate and preparing for an academic career. I managed to eke out an hour or two a week for entertainment. I spent some of that time with Rod.

Night Gallery was a more adult version of The Twilight Zone, scarier and darker. But there were moments of levity. “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture” was one of them. Carl Reiner played an instructor of comparative religion at Miskatonic University (Lovecraft’s fictional school). After covering all the major cults, Professor Peabody introduces his students to the Elder Gods of Lovecraft. He treats it like a joke, but as he speaks the forbidden names, the sky gets darker. Thunder begins to rumble. When he reaches the end of his lecture, he has been transformed into one of Lovecraft’s terrible creatures.

 I remembered watching that episode in awe.

Holy crap. Serling’s putting a spin on H.P. Lovecraft.

He’s making it funny.

“Cool Air” followed. The original story was about a man who discovers the doctor that lives upstairs has been keeping himself alive through artificial means. It is one of Lovecraft’s shorter stories. Serling changed only one thing. He made the narrator a woman.

Women, I thought. There are no women in Lovecraft’s stories.

I re-read Lovecraft, convinced I was wrong.

There were some women in his tales, but they weren’t the main characters. And to say they were underdeveloped…well, that’s putting it mildly.

Rod Serling’s adaptations spawned two life-changing ‘what if” questions.

What if I could make Miskatonic University my own, using my experience as a student and an adjunct professor?

What if I told the story from the perspective of a female undergraduate trying to prove herself in a male-dominated world ?

Two questions.

Two simple questions and there was no looking back.

 I left the traditional world of academia and devoted my life to creating a fictional one.

 I’ve been happy ever since…

A loving spoof of The Twilight Zone, courtesy of Futurama