“Alan Austen, as nervous as a kitten, went up certain dark and creaky stairs in the neighborhood of Pell Street, and peered about for a long time on the dim landing before he found the name he wanted written obscurely on one of the doors.”
John Collier’s very short two-page story “The Chaser” was the basis for The Twilight Zone episode of the same name and, as such, I decided to give it a read (since I have been trying to read every short story and radio play that inspired The Twilight Zone). Interestingly enough, the acquisition of the rights to this story by Cayuga Productions has a round-about story. The episode “The Chaser” was based on a script by writer Robert Presnell, Jr. which was, itself, based John Collier’s short story. In 1951, John Collier sold the rights to his story to Presnell so that it could be made into a play. But Twilight Zone producer Buck Houghton was able to purchase the rights directly from Collier for $2,000 but The Twilight Zone produced the Presnell script (instead of having someone like Rod Serling adapt the story into a teleplay). And the Presnell script dates back nearly a decade before The Twilight Zone episode as “Duet for Two Actors” which debuted on February 20, 1951 for The Billy Rose Show (a.k.a. “Billy Rose’s Playbill Theater”).
In the original story, a man named Alan Austen has been told by an unidentified person to climb the stairs and find a room with a name written above it. Inside he finds a sparse room with no furniture aside from a kitchen table, a chair, a shelf with a dozen bottles and jars or so, and an old man in rocking chair. He asks the old man about an elixir with “extraordinary effects.” At first, the old man offers a “cleaning fluid” (which is a poison), but then it becomes clear that Alan Austen wants a love potion and that the old man is some sort of alchemist:
“My dear sir,” replied the old man, “my stock in trade is not very large –I don’t deal in laxatives and teething mixtures—but such as it is it is varied. I think nothing I sell has effects which could be precisely described as ordinary.”
In the course of their brief conversation (in which Alan declares “that is love!” to the old man’s description of an obsessed woman), the old man offers to sell Alan the love potion for a measly $1, whereas the “cleaning fluid” would have gone for a whopping $5,000. In a final note of caution, the old man mentions that later in life, customers who buy the love potion often return to buy things that are more expensive (such as the “cleaning fluid”). It is a dark tale about the nature of love and obsession.
Unlike in The Twilight Zone episode of the same name, the original short story never portrays its protagonist (Alan Austen) as delivering the love potion to his beloved, nor the after-effects of her pesky obsession with him. Instead, it merely alludes to the fact that many customers one day return to the mysterious old man, just as the episode protagonist (Roger Shackelforth) returns to Professor A. Daemon where he purchases the poison, only to stop himself from killing his beloved Leila when she announces she is pregnant. Both the Twilight Zone episode and John Collier’s original short story that inspired it present a cautionary tale and a very cynical view of love.
Collier, John. Fancies and Goodnights. New York Review of Books, New York, New York, collection republished in 2003.
Click here for my full review of The Twilight Zone episode “The Chaser.”
Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.