WHO / WHAT / WHY

WELCOME READERS & WRITERS. We sincerely hope that all of you come to consider this site as a place where readers feel free to make comments; where talented writers feel encouraged to submit their work for consideration; and where all can respectfully exchange ideas.

Rod Serling is one of the world's foremost storytellers. Living in an era of great American turbulence and change (WWII thru the end of the Vietnam War), he was a pioneer of the Golden Age of Television, creator of The Twilight Zone, and winner of six Emmys, more than any writer in history. Always concerned with the well-being of humanity, he constantly fought censors to bring socially relevant content to television. In the last 25 years of his too short 50 years, he wrote more than 250 scripts, published 8 books, and started & ran his own production company, Cayuga Productions Inc., which produced all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone (of which he wrote 92).  A consummate gentleman respected by all who worked with him and loved by those he taught, Serling was in every way a class act.

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Rod Serling Books was founded by his daughter Anne and her husband utilizing Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, and Audible groups to publish her father's out-of-print books; provide a platform for writers to publish works of a similar genre & quality; and afford readers another dimension of thought provoking stories. 

Established and new authors of all ages are welcome and encouraged to submit their stories for consideration by our editorial board. Beyond publishing quality works, we hope all will see this as an opportunity to be part of a group of like-minded writers / readers - a literary club, if you will - who use our "Thoughts & Discussions" (Blog) page to foster both comradery and lively discussions concerning the human condition in today's world. 

EDITORIAL BOARD

A MESSAGE FROM ANNE:

We are incredibly fortunate to have the support, encouragement and participation of such an experienced and qualified editorial board.  All are professional writers who ply their craft daily; all have been personally involved with my dad and/or his work; and all are excited about using this imprint as a platform to discover and help writers of merit.

I thank each for so generously contributing forwards to the new editions of my father's original books.

Website:   anneserling.com

Facebook:   Anne Serling Books

 ANNE SERLING

Before becoming a full time writer, author/poet Anne Serling was an early childhood teacher with a Bachelor of Arts degree in education from Elmira College. She serves on the board of directors of the  Serling Memorial Foundation and is involved with Binghamton, New York’s School of the Arts “Fifth Dimension” program.

Anne wrote predominately poetry until she was published in The Twilight Zone, The Original Stories, an anthology, in which she adapted two of her father's teleplays, One for the Angels and The Changing of the Guard into short stories. The latter was subsequently published in The Twilight Zone Magazine. Additionally, she has had poetry published in The Cornell Daily Sun and Visions. Recently her works have appeared in Salon.Com and Huffington Post.

Anne’s memoir, AS I KNEW HIM: My Dad Rod Serling, was released April 30th by Citadel Press/ Kensington Publishing Corp. and she is currently writing a novel titled AFTERSHOCKS.

Tel:    619 - 251 - 8502

Email:   jim@tvtimemachine.com

Website:   tvtimemachine.com

Facebook:   tvtimemachine

Twitter:   tvtimemachine

JIM BENSON

A TV historian for over twenty-five years, Jim co-authored Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour with Scott Skelton in 1997. The book is hailed as one of the finest ever written about a television series. Jim served as creative consultant on the Mystery Channel’s Night Gallery documentary, The Art of Darkness and he worked with Academy Award-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro in his capacity as Historical Consultant with Scott Skelton on Universal Home Video’s Night Gallery Season Two DVD box set.

In 2011, Jim provided and produced audio commentary for Image Entertainment’s The Twilight Zone Blu-Ray DVD release. His company TV Time Machine Productions released the DVD of the 1962 ABC TV sitcom I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster starring John Astin and Marty Ingels, the first time the show has been viewed in 50 years.

In 2012, Jim and Scott teamed up again to produce a “lost episode” for Universal Studio’s DVD release of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Season 3. The pair painstakingly pieced together rare, unseen footage that had languished in Universal’s vaults for over 40 years. 

As radio host of the syndicated talk show TV Time Machine, Jim has interviewed a multitude of legendary TV celebrities, authors and experts including Mel Brooks, Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), Peter Falk and many others, as well as stars and producers of modern-day shows such as The Mentalist (Bruno Heller) and Vikings (Michael Hirst). TV Time Machine also has explored topics such as Technology on TV (with then-Scientific American Editor-in-Chief John Rennie) and TV’s Turning Points (with Syracuse University professor Robert J. Thompson).

Mr. Benson has contributed his unique expertise to a wide variety of television programs, including Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, and productions for TV Land, Showtime, Nick at Nite, NBC/Universal, CBS Entertainment, and Starz/Encore.

MARK DAWIDZIAK

Mark Dawidziak has been the television critic at the Cleveland Plain Dealer since July 1999. During his sixteen years at the Akron Beacon Journal, he held such posts as TV columnist, movie critic and critic-at-large.

Before moving to Ohio in 1983, he worked as a theater, film and TV critic at newspapers in Tennessee and Virginia. He began his journalism career in the late ’70s at the Associated Press and Knight-Ridder bureaus in Washington, D.C.

Also an author and playwright, his many books include the 1994 horror novel Grave Secrets and two histories of landmark TV series: The Columbo Phile: A Casebook (1989) and The Night Stalker Companion (1997). A recognized Mark Twain scholar, his acclaimed books on the author include Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing (1996) and Horton Foote’s The Shape of the River: The Lost Teleplay About Mark Twain (2003). He frequently is invited to lecture on Twain or television history at universities, libraries and museums. He has twice been the guest lecturer at Elmira College’s Center for Mark Twain Studies.

His 11th book, The Bedside, Bathtub, & Armchair Companion to Dracula, was published in 2008 by Continuum. Written with Paul J. Bauer, Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, was published in 2011 with a foreword by Ken Burns by the Kent State University Press. It’s the first full-length biography of “hobo writer” Jim Tully, a forgotten author hailed as “America’s Gorky” and as a literary superstar in the 1920s and ’30s. In preparation for the biography, he and Bauer have edited and written introductions for four Kent State University Press reprints of books by Tully: Beggars of Life, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish and The Bruiser.

His work on the horror side of the street also includes a play (The Tell-Tale Play), short stories and comic books scripts. Several of his essays and introductions appear in Richard Matheson’s Kolchak Scripts (2003) and Bloodlines: Richard Matheson’s Dracula, I Am Legend, and Other Vampire Stories (2006), two books he edited for Gauntlet Press. He contributed the career appreciation and overview to Produced and Directed by Dan Curtis (2004) and he is the creative consultant to Moonstone’s comic book series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  

Dawidziak and his wife, actress Sara Showman, founded the Largely Literary Theater Company in 2002. Dedicated to promoting literacy and literature, the company has staged his three-person version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and his two-act play based on sketches by Mark Twain, The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated. In addition to directing the Largely Literary plays, he portrays Twain and Dickens. He met his wife when both were cast in a regional theater production of Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor (he played the Anton Chekhov role, later appearing with her as the H.L. Mencken character in Inherit the Wind).

As a performer, he has been a member of two comedy teams (using the stage name Mark Daniels). In 1993, he reunited with one of his former partners to win the routine contest at the first-ever Abbott & Costello Convention.

His Critics’ Classics video essay on director Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe was shown regularly on the American Movie Classics cable channel, and he has appeared in such documentaries as the A&E Biography profile of Peter Falk. He has written the liner notes for the Columbia House Video Library’s Collector’s Editions of several TV series, including Columbo, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Quincy, The Odd Couple, 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Carol Burnett Show, F Troop, Hart to Hart, Magnum, p.i. and Murder, She Wrote.

Dawidziak also has been a regular contributor to such magazines as TV Guide, Commonwealth, Cinefantastique, Scarlet Street, Mystery Scene, Sci-Fi Universe, Not of This Earth, Knoxville Lifestyle, Self-Reliant, Ohio Magazine and Parent’s Choice. A member of the Television Critics Association’s board of directors for five years, he has won five Cleveland Press Club awards for entertainment writing, as well as a Society of Professional Journalists award for coverage of minority issues.

A journalism graduate of George Washington University, he was born in Huntington, New York. He lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, with his wife and their daughter, Rebecca “Becky” Claire.

MARK OLSHAKER

Mark Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, New York Times best-selling non-fiction author and critically acclaimed novelist. In his research, writing and consulting, he has worked closely with many of the nation’s leading experts in the fields of law enforcement and criminal justice, public health, disease prevention, intelligence, bio-defense and pandemic planning, and is adept at translating complex issues of science, medicine and law for the general public.

The books he has written with John Douglas, beginning with MINDHUNTER, have sold millions of copies, been translated into many languages and, along with his Emmy-nominated film, Mind of a Serial Killer, for the PBS series NOVA, made Olshaker a sought-after speaker and consultant on criminal justice and victims’ rights issues.

He and Douglas cowrote the lead chapter for the textbook FORENSIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE, published in 2001 by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, recently revised for the second edition.His and Douglas’s next book, LAW & DISORDER, concerning failures of the criminal justice system, will be published in 2013. Their newest program for NOVA, Who Killed Lindbergh’s Baby?, will also be broadcast in 2013.

Olshaker is the author of the highly praised novels EINSTEIN’S BRAIN, UNNATURAL CAUSES, BLOOD RACE, THE EDGE and BROKEN WINGS. The San Diego Union praised EINSTEIN’S BRAIN as “Fantastic!  Here is high adventure. . . a well-told novel which keeps the reader in a state of excitement.”  Kirkus Reviews described UNNATURAL CAUSES as a ”First-class thriller,” with a story that “grips like a racing high fever.”  Publishers Weekly called THE EDGE  “fiendishly disturbing” and “a darkly imagined thriller marked by brisk action and a mind-bending denouement.” John Barkham called it “one of the most exciting of the year as well as one of the most ingenious.”

Olshaker also has extensive experience with the other field of life-and-death detective work: medical mystery. His research with the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRID) led to his novel UNNATURAL CAUSES and nonfiction book VIRUS HUNTER (with C.J. Peters, M.D., then CDC Chief of Special Pathogens) and the PBS programs What’s Killing the Children? Bioterror: Dealing With a New Reality,  Avoiding Armageddon and Anatomy of a Pandemic, as well as an expertise in public health information and medical crisis management. The New York Times placed VIRUS HUNTER on its Noteworthy and Recommended lists and The New England Journal of Medicine compared it to Paul de Kruif’s celebrated Microbe Hunters, declaring that the book “is not merely the exhilarating tale of three decades of scientific research. It is also an outspoken, comprehensive analysis of the political and human issues that front-line scientists fighting outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever deal with daily.”

Olshaker is a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department Office for Victims of Crime and has served as a consultant to the National Library of Medicine.

He began his career at the Washington Bureau of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and has written for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsday, The Washington Times, New Times and Washingtonian. In addition to his work on criminal justice and public health, he has written and produced documentary films across a wide variety of subjects, including history, architecture, science, medicine and drama. He wrote, produced and directed Discovering Hamlet, a behind-the-scenes look at the mounting of an innovative production of Hamlet, perhaps the greatest literary murder mystery of all time. It featured Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Kenneth Branagh.

Olshaker’s biography appears in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. He is President of the Norman Mailer Society, past Chairman of the Cosmos Club Foundation and serves on the boards of the Shakespeare Guild of America and the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation.

SCOTT SKELTON

Scott Skelton is a resident of Eugene, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Anna, and son, Liev Magnus, and their four cats. He graduated with a B.S. in journalism from the University of Oregon, where he currently works as a publications editor for the Design and Editing Services division of the Office of Strategic Communications.

His first book, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour, coauthored by Jim Benson, was published by Syracuse University Press in 1999. He served as creative consultant on the Mystery Channel’s Night Gallery documentary, The Art of Darkness, and provided audio commentary along with Jim Benson and Academy Award-nominated film director Guillermo Del Toro for Universal Home Video’s second-season DVD release of Night Gallery. In 2012, Scott and Jim contributed to the special features of Universal Studios’ third-season DVD release of Night Gallery by reconstructing a “lost episode,”  painstakingly piecing together rare, unseen footage that had languished in Universal’s vaults for more than forty years. In addition, he provided audio commentary for seasons two, three, four, and five of Image Entertainment’s The Twilight Zone blu-ray DVD release.