Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories

In this speculative memoir, Elayne Zalis contemplates how The Twilight Zone sparked her imagination when she was a young girl growing up in Miami, Florida, in the late 1950s and early '60s. She considers selected episodes of the classic television series from the child's perspective and includes remixes and mash-ups of the shows, similar to fan fiction. In the process of telling these stories, the adult narrator reinvents both the child she was and the woman she has become.
The Twilight Zone serves as a springboard to creative thought. A portrait emerges of a writer as a young TV fan in the Kennedy era. Her personal stories contribute to public dialogues about the impact of television and popular culture on the baby boomer generation, and the collection as a whole experiments with novel approaches to life writing in the digital age. Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan's Stories complements Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective, a creative autobiography Zalis published in 2023.