The

The I've mentioned several times on the show my own introduction to the Twilight Zone as a child.

I used to wait up until two or three in the morning for an episode to air on British television so I could watch it and tape it.

Often I would be struggling to stay awake or dropping off partway through the episode,

so there alone in the small hours watching this

already strange and surreal show, I would wake the next day perhaps only remembering certain

images or certain lines of dialogue. And sometimes my mind would even distort these, making my memory different from what was actually on screen.

So this was my Twilight Zone experience and it's one of the reasons why the show is so unique in my memory.

It really was the place between light and shadow.

Now I still get some of that feeling back when I watch the Twilight Zone now but not completely

it was a time and a place that's hard to recapture.

But a few years ago quite unexpectedly I did manage to recapture that feeling.

When I began the Twilight Zone podcast, I picked up every book on the show that I could,

and one of the books was called Visions from the Twilight Zone by Arlen Schumer.

The book isn't an episode by episode analysis, it's not about the production of the show itself.

The point of visions from the Twilight Zone is to distill the very essence of the show into book form, to recreate the feelings of the show,

rather than the specific detail. And it's this book that took me back to that place as a child

in the dark watching the twilight zone, as if in a dream being amazed in images and words.

The creator of that book, Arlen Schumer, is an artist and comic book and pop culture historian.

Whatever he's commenting on, the Twilight Zone is never far away.

Because of his particular skill set, he can talk about

the subtext and historical significance of the Twilight Zone, but he also speaks the language of an

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