Twilight Zone literature

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Twilight Zone literature is an umbrella term for the many books and comic books which concern or adapt The Twilight Zone television series. The Twilight Zone was a pioneer in this area, preceding the more popular literary movements which would follow Star Trek or Star Wars and which is now a staple of all successful movies, television series and video games.

Numerous novelizations were published based upon episodes of Twilight Zone, as were several volumes of original short stories published under the Twilight Zone brand and edited by Rod Serling himself.

Gold Key Comics published a long-running Twilight Zone comic that featured the likeness of Serling introducing both original stories and occasional adaptations of episodes. The comic outlived the television series by nearly 20 years and Serling by nearly a decade. A later revival of Twilight Zone comics was published by Now Comics, spinning off of the 1980s revival of the show.

In 1982, Marc Scott Zicree published an episode-by-episode guide of the original series, The Twilight Zone Companion (published by Bantam Books) which became a best-seller and greatly influenced future tomes on television series.

For nearly a decade beginning in 1981 and with T. E. D. Klein as editor for most of its existence, The Twilight Zone Magazine featured horror fiction and to some extent other forms of fantasy and some borderline science fiction. The TZ magazine reviewed and previewed new movies while publishing articles about the original and revival Twilight Zone television series, among other cultural oddities; it was the most reliable market for much of the best short horror in that period, and appealed to audiences for the likes of Fangoria and Starlog as well as for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Whispers (Magazine/Anthologies). Like Omni Magazine, which it also somewhat resembled, it was published by a company better-known for "skin" magazines, Gallery's Montcalm Publishing. It briefly had an all-fiction digest-sized companion, Night Cry. This also has made a cameo in The Simpsons 300th episode, "Strong Arms of The Ma".