“He drove into the strange new town, parked the car in front of the hotel on Main Street and climbed out” (opening line).
George Clayton Johnson’s unpublished fantastical short story “All Of Us Are Dying” is a wonderful little piece of speculative fiction. It was made into The Twilight Zone episode “The Four Of Us Are Dying” (briefly pitched under the title “Rubberface”) before the short story was finally published decades later in The Twilight Zone magazine in 1982. I recently got my hands on George Clayton Johnson’s short story collection All Of Us Are Dying and Other Stories which has been in and out print for years. Much like the experience of reading the short stories of other celebrated Twilight Zone writers like Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson, I was keen to compare the Twilight Zone episode with the original short story.
In the short story, we are introduced to an unnamed man who is repeatedly recognized under different names as he goes about town. He is quite a protean figure. First he is recognized as a man named Sam Windgate, then Fred Black, then Ben Hoffmier, and then Mike Grover, and so on. He seems to be taking on different identities everywhere he goes, and some of the people he meets apparently owe him money. What exactly is going on here?
As it turns out, our unnamed protagonist discovered years ago that he possessed a secret supernatural power at a very young age. Back at the age of twelve he surprised himself inside his room: “One night, standing before the mirror in the bathroom, he looked long and searchingly into his face and discovered his secret. If he held his head cocked so, he looked like Charlie Brice. If he smiled thus he looked like Billie Warner. If he frowned and lowered his eyebrows, he was Pud” (110). In other words, he found out that he could inexplicably transform his face to look exactly like other people. He is an accidental modern shape-shifter.
He learned to perfect this ability from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-one, planning out ways he could monetize this supernatural gift –“He discovered he had friends in every town always good for a free meal, a place to stay or a loan of money.” But in time, he grew tired of having an ever-changing mercurial identity. He wanted to settle down and get married. However, he has been tallying up numbers in a little black book, showing which people owe him a “loan” or “gift,” totaling about ten thousand dollars per year.
At the end of this very brief story, the unnamed protagonist is suddenly recognized at a gas station under the name “Arthur Danyluk.” An irate gas station attendant storms over to him and claims he has been looking for Arthur Danyluk ten years, hoping to punish him. For what? We don’t really know. The attendant grabs the gas nozzle while our protagonist tries desperately to change his facial appearance, hoping to say he is actually someone else, but it is too late. The attendant violently beats the man, killing him: “He was Ben Hoffmier. He was Fred Black. He was Mike Grover. And he was Arthur Danyluk. And all of them were dying.”
The corresponding Twilight Zone episode of similar name has a few notable differences from the short story, though it does keep the broader narrative idea intact. For example, the episode changes all the character’s names (the four shape-shifting identities in the episode are named Arch Hammer, Johnny Foster, Virgil Sterig, and Andy Marshak). And in the episode, the protagonist is more explicitly shown to be a low-life scheming con man who is constantly on the run –from the mafia, from the police, and even from an angry father who murders him (the father believes he has murdered his own villainous son), whereas in the short story the unnamed protagonist is a bit more vulnerable and sympathetic, with dreams of leading a normal middle-class life. In the end, both the short story and the episode end with a moral message about cosmic justice as both protagonists meet their grisly conclusion, perhaps divine punishment for exploiting a unique gift for selfish purposes.
Johnson, George Clayton. All Of Us Are Dying and Other Stories. Shadowridge Press. 1999.
Click here to read my review of The Twilight Zone episode “The Four Of Us Are Dying.”
Thanks so much. I’m looking for the book, and you’ve inspired me to watch The Twilight Zone again. Btw, his daughter wrote a book.
I didn’t realize George Clayton Johnson’s daughter wrote a book, I’ll have to look it up. Thanks!