It's A Good Life Review

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By the time I sat down to read Jerome Bixby’s “It’s A Good Life,” I was already familiar with the classic Twilight Zone episode. I had already been substantially creeped out by it, and I wondered if the short story would live up to the hype. After all, the TZ episode is a classic. The results, I have to say, surprised me.

Bixby wrote this story in 1953, and it was eventually turned into a Twilight Zone episode in 1961. By 1970, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America chose it as one of the twenty best sci-fi stories published before the Nebula Award. The story appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2. The story follows a young boy with god-like powers, capable of reading minds, teleporting, transforming others into whatever he wishes, and more. Because whatever he wishes comes to pass, the townspeople fear him and try to pretend that everything is fine and happy to appease him.

Like my previous review of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, this story presented sci-fi horrors almost beyond my comprehension. All I could think of was how I wouldn’t have been able to survive in that situation. Some of the ways people are changed when they try to oppose the boy make for some horrifying stuff. But that just made me love the story more, to be honest. It presented an impossible idea and asked readers what to make of it. It also presents an allegory for how we face things out of our control. Today, major issues at hand remain impossible to ignore and impossible to do anything about. The same holds true for 1953, and the story conveys that metaphor to a terrifying degree.

The story’s writing also lends itself to the horror and the message conveyed. The imagery comes in clear, concise descriptions that make it easy to imagine what’s going on. That makes things all the more frightening when you envision rats being tortured and things like that. The story also leaves certain things up to your imagination. By the end, the writing remains effective, and the idea stands on its own. I included an example below:

“He sat on the couch, with two other men, holding Ethel Hollis flat against the cushions, holding her arms and legs and putting their hands over her mouth, so she couldn’t start screaming again.

“It’s really good!” he said again.

Mom looked out of the front window, across the darkened road, across Henderson’s darkened wheatfield to the vast, endless, gray nothingness in which the little village of Peaksville floated like a soul–the huge nothingness that was evident at night, when Anthony’s brassy day had gone.

It did no good to wonder where they were … no good at all. Peaksville was just someplace. Someplace away from the world. It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates–God rest him–had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing. He had taken the village someplace. Or had destroyed the world and left only the village, nobody knew which.“

I highly recommend you read this short story (and also watch the Twilight Zone episode, which does a good job of conveying the horror). See you all next week for another review! Since it’s October, I might consider continuing this journey of terrifying sci-fi short stories.

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