Richard Matheson: Long Live the Gremlin on the Wing
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Every time I fly, I peer out the window and think about “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the short story made into a famous episode of The Twilight Zone about a gremlin on the wing of an airplane tearing apart the engine wiring. Every time I drive on the freeway and a semi fills my rearview mirror, I think of “Duel,” the short story adapted into Steven Spielberg’s first film about the unseen driver of a tanker truck playing cat-and-mouse with a terrified salesman. Every time I shop at Costco, I look at the barred ceiling windows and the stacks of dried goods and think that this would be the place to go when the apocalypse — so rivetingly and despairingly captured in the 1954 novel I Am Legend — finally turns our family and friends into night-stalking ghouls.
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