Twilight at the Gates, by Mark Allan Gunnells
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Twilight at the Gates by Mark Allan Gunnells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a Twilight Zone fan. I find myself tuning in to the marathons to watch “just one episode,” and then watch “just one more and …” You get the idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have thrown in a few bars of the opening theme to conversations about the weird and the strange. The Twilight Zone is, I would argue, a cultural icon. I’ve always loved it.
Mark Allan Gunnells has always loved The Twilight Zone, too. This rich and wonderful collection is his homage to the show, and is “a testament to [his] love of The Twilight Zone” and its “profound influence” on his creative work (“In the Zone,” Twilight at the Gates, 165, 166). The reader will find a treasure trove here: 28 short shorts, some flash fiction-length, and 3 poems, all of which display Gunnells’s talent as a storyteller and the influence of this iconic TV program. The program’s “trademark ironic twists,” the surreal view of the world, a world that is “recognizably our world,” yet “slightly off-kilter” are all here, presented through Gunnells’ “undeniably modern imagination,” that often uses an LGBTQ+ lens (165, 166). As Gunnells notes, these are not meant to be retellings of the various episodes, but rather stories told in the spirit of these episodes and the sometimes dark truths Gunnells has gleaned from them.
The stories and poems here have a wide range, from the dark and macabre to commentary on the world of the contemporary reader. A gay kiss eases the pain of a ghost trapped in the place where he died, a victim of homophobia. A wife takes revenge on her paranoid and brutally abusive husband through the magic of an old spell, a cardinal, and hair woven into a nest. In “If Heaven is a Library,” it is the nature of Hell that is examined. Just what would be one’s personal hell? This fascination with our relationship to the nature of the divine seems to be a favorite of Gunnells. Is this relationship a benign one, or a malevolent one? Or indifferent? “In the Hands of an Indifferent God, the Almighty is a six-year-old, with a snow globe, inside our world. Shake the glove a few times, and one has an idyllic winter scene, or is it?
Two of my favorites of these tales include “Turn the Lights Off” and “Knowledge is Power.” “Lights” is about the love between husbands, and how this love can sustain us in the darkest of times—even if the darkest here is more bittersweet. “Knowledge is Power” again asks what is the nature of God and the nature of our relationship with God. This question asks us to re-examine such familiar symbols and images as the serpent, the garden, and the apple. That such questions can be found in these short short stories, attests to Gunnells’ skill and talent. The sweet and the dark are here in this collection, and the horrific, and the hopeful. In this collection, the reader is “traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind …” (Serling, Twilight Zone). That he invites us into his mind and his imaginative process, in the concluding “Story Notes,” is an added plus.
Welcome to the twilight zone of Mark Gunnells’ imagination.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
Twilight at the Gates by Mark Allan GunnellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a Twilight Zone fan. I find myself tuning in to the marathons to watch “just one episode,” and then watch “just one more and …” You get the idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have thrown in a few bars of the opening theme to conversations about the weird and the strange. The Twilight Zone is, I would argue, a cultural icon. I’ve always loved it.
Mark Allan Gunnells has always loved The Twilight Zone, too. This rich and wonderful collection is his homage to the show, and is “a testament to [his] love of The Twilight Zone” and its “profound influence” on his creative work (“In the Zone,” Twilight at the Gates, 165, 166). The reader will find a treasure trove here: 28 short shorts, some flash fiction-length, and 3 poems, all of which display Gunnells’s talent as a storyteller and the influence of this iconic TV program. The program’s “trademark ironic twists,” the surreal view of the world, a world that is “recognizably our world,” yet “slightly off-kilter” are all here, presented through Gunnells’ “undeniably modern imagination,” that often uses an LGBTQ+ lens (165, 166). As Gunnells notes, these are not meant to be retellings of the various episodes, but rather stories told in the spirit of these episodes and the sometimes dark truths Gunnells has gleaned from them.
The stories and poems here have a wide range, from the dark and macabre to commentary on the world of the contemporary reader. A gay kiss eases the pain of a ghost trapped in the place where he died, a victim of homophobia. A wife takes revenge on her paranoid and brutally abusive husband through the magic of an old spell, a cardinal, and hair woven into a nest. In “If Heaven is a Library,” it is the nature of Hell that is examined. Just what would be one’s personal hell? This fascination with our relationship to the nature of the divine seems to be a favorite of Gunnells. Is this relationship a benign one, or a malevolent one? Or indifferent? “In the Hands of an Indifferent God, the Almighty is a six-year-old, with a snow globe, inside our world. Shake the glove a few times, and one has an idyllic winter scene, or is it?
Two of my favorites of these tales include “Turn the Lights Off” and “Knowledge is Power.” “Lights” is about the love between husbands, and how this love can sustain us in the darkest of times—even if the darkest here is more bittersweet. “Knowledge is Power” again asks what is the nature of God and the nature of our relationship with God. This question asks us to re-examine such familiar symbols and images as the serpent, the garden, and the apple. That such questions can be found in these short short stories, attests to Gunnells’ skill and talent. The sweet and the dark are here in this collection, and the horrific, and the hopeful. In this collection, the reader is “traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind …” (Serling, Twilight Zone). That he invites us into his mind and his imaginative process, in the concluding “Story Notes,” is an added plus.
Welcome to the twilight zone of Mark Gunnells’ imagination.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
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