An Expanded Edition of “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour” Will Soon Be on Exhibition

If you’re looking for a book about The Twilight Zone, you have several to choose from, starting with Marc Zicree’s seminal “Companion.” But if you want to read about Night Gallery, Serling’s follow-up series in the early ’70s, your choices are limited, really, to just one volume: “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour.”

Fortunately, it’s an excellent work. The copy I’ve owned for over two decades is a well-thumbed softcover autographed by co-author Scott Skelton (who I met when we did a presentation at Serling Fest 2019). It’s a treasure trove of information, and a great read. Scott and co-author Jim Benson dug into the archives and interviewed dozens of people who worked on both sides of the camera, and served up a highly entertaining slice of TV history.

When they followed that up a couple years ago with “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: The Art of Darkness,” an oversized volume containing high-quality reproductions of all the show’s paintings, I was in Gallery heaven. What could be better?

Oh, how about a new, expanded edition of Scott and Jim’s original book?

Usually, when an “expanded” edition of some book comes out, it means you get a new foreword, an afterword, or other mostly cosmetic improvements. Not this time. This new edition more than doubles the size of the previous one. The original was 404 pages; this one is 824. The original featured a limited number of pics, all in black and white; this one is crammed with pics, many of them in color. Material that the original publisher insisted on cutting in the 1990s has been restored and augmented with new interviews with surviving cast and crew members.

It’s available via Kickstarter, and I’m not a bit surprised that it’s already blown through its original fundraising goal. The campaign runs until November 5, so if you’re interested in helping it become an even bigger success (and thereby unlocking further rewards), be sure and get your pledge in before the deadline. It may not be cheap, but as you can tell from my description, it’s well worth the money — as “The Art of Darkness,” which was also launched via Kickstarter, already proved.

I’ve been sharing some exclusive peeks at the new content on my Twitter page over the last few days, and Jim Benson was kind enough to share some page previews as well. Check it out:

Between this, the “Art of Darkness” book, and the fact that the series has finally been coming out on Blu-ray, it’s a great time to be a Night Gallery fan. So if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, don’t wait! You won’t want to be left behind in this shadowy museum of the macabre …

***

For a daily dose of Serling, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. You can also get email notifications of future posts by entering your address under “Follow S&S Via Email” on the upper left-hand side of this post.

Hope to see you in some corner of the fifth dimension soon!