is when the grither finally arrives. The author
never explains the ending in any detail, leaving it
to our own imagination to speculate about what
follows. The concept that a strong enough belief
can have physical effects on the world is a com-
mon one in fantasy and horror, but it has rarely
been used to such chilling effect.
The Sentinel Jeffrey Konvitz(1974)
Much American horror fiction at least implicitly
has a religious undertone, good versus evil, and
often makes it much more explicit and clearly
Christian. Vampires are repelled by crosses and
holy water, demons cannot enter hallowed ground,
and satanists use altered versions of Christian reli-
gious rituals. Some of the most famous horror nov-
els have been even more clearly religiously
themed. William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST
(1971) involves the efforts by two priests to expel a
demon from a child it has possessed, and THE
OMEN(1976), by David Seltzer, involves the com-
ing of the Antichrist. More recently, Thomas F.
MONTELEONEused strong religious themes in sev-
eral novels, including The Blood of the Lamb
(1993), The Reckoning(1999), and Eyes of the Vir-
gin(2002).
Jeffrey Konvitz drew on that same resource for
his first novel, The Sentinel(1974). The story in-
volves a fashion model who moves into a new
apartment building. Shortly after meeting one of
her neighbors, an enigmatic blind priest, she begins
to experience vivid recollections of unpleasant in-
cidents from her past, including her unsuccessful
suicide attempts. She is also bothered by the noises
caused by other residents in the apartment house,
a collection of distorted and unpleasant characters
she never sees outside the building. When she fi-
nally decides to investigate directly, she discovers
that she and the priest are the only tenants and
that the others are illusions. That leads to the rev-
elation that the priest is actually guarding a door-
way between our world and hell and that the
sounds she hears are the demons trying to break
through. Even worse, she has not come there by
accident but has been manipulated by the church,
which plans to use her as a replacement for the
priest, who is dying.
Konvitz cowrote the screenplay for the 1977
film version and then added a sequel, The
Guardian(1979, also published as Sentinel IIand as
The Apocalypse), which introduced new protago-
nists but which is otherwise basically a minor vari-
ation of the original story and less effective
because we already know what the guardian really
does. His only other published novel, Monster
(1982, also published as The Beast), is a relatively
suspenseful story of the Loch Ness monster.Serling, Rod(1924–1975)
Rod Serling will, of course, always be remembered
for hosting and writing many of the scripts for the
popular television series The Twilight Zone,which
ran from 1959 through 1964, its title becoming a
part of everyday vernacular. The television series
won three Hugo Awards for best dramatic presen-
tation. A second series of similarly formatted an-
thology stories was Night Gallery,which ran from
1970 through 1973. Although Serling adapted
some stories by other writers, perhaps most notably
“IT’S A GOOD LIFE” (1953), by Jerome Bixby, and
“LITTLE GIRL LOST” (1953), by Richard MATHE-
SON, he penned a very large proportion of the
screenplays and original stories himself. Serling,
who also wrote outside the genre, won numerous
awards for his dramatic work during his lifetime.
Although Serling was active as a writer be-
yond the limits of his television career, his
strongest and best-remembered works can be
found in the three collections of stories he adapted
from his own screenplays, Stories from the Twilight
Zone(1960), More Stories from the Twilight Zone
(1961), and New Stories from the Twilight Zone
(1962). They were published in one volume in- Two further collections from Night Gallery
are of lesser interest. Serling ranged from science
fiction to fantasy to horror, but most of his stories
share a very similar tone. “The Monsters Are Due
on Maple Street” (1960), in which the terrors that
spread through a typical suburb prove to be com-
pletely imaginary, is typical in that it demonstrates
that most of our fears are of our own making.
Serling had a superb talent for suspense, as in
“Where Is Everybody?” (1960) and “The Odyssey
of Flight 33” (1961), as well as an inventive sense
312 The Sentinel