Plot
Six-year-old Anthony Fremont looks like any other little boy, but looks can be deceiving: he is a monster, a mutant with godlike mental powers. Early on, he isolated the small town of Peaksville, Ohio. In fact, the handful of inhabitants do not even know if he destroyed the rest of the world or if he whisked them away to some uncharted territory. Anthony has also eliminated electricity, automobiles, and television signals. He controls the weather and what supplies can be found in the grocery store. Anthony creates and destroys as he pleases (such as when he made and killed a "three-headed gopher"), and controls when and what the residents can watch on the TV.
The adults, including his own parents, tiptoe nervously around him, constantly telling him how everything he does is "good", since displeasing him can get them wished away into a mystical "cornfield", from which there is no return. At one point, a dog is heard barking angrily. Anthony thinks the dog is "bad" and "doesn't like at all", and wishes it into the cornfield. His father and mother are horrified, but they dare not show it.
Finally, at Dan Hollis' birthday party, Dan gets two presents from his wife: a brandy and a Perry Como record. As he is eager to listen to the record, he is reminded by everyone that Anthony doesn't like singing. Getting slightly drunk from the brandy and complaining about not listening to Perry Como and no one singing "Happy Birthday" to him, Dan cannot take the strain anymore and confronts Anthony, calling him a monster and a murderer. While Anthony's anger grows, Dan yells for someone to kill Anthony from behind, and end his reign of terror. Aunt Amy (who isn't able to sing anymore because of Anthony) tentatively reaches for a poker, but no one has the courage to act. Anthony cries out to Dan, "You're a bad man! You're a very bad man! And you keep thinking bad thoughts about me!" and points at him. Dan is killed, shown indirectly by his shadow, transformed into a jack-in-the-box with his human head, causing his wife (now widow) to break down. The adults are horrified at what Anthony had done to Dan and beg him to wish it to the cornfield, which he does.
Because of Amy's earlier complaints about the heat, Anthony causes snow to begin falling outside. His father observes that the snow will kill off at least half the crops and as he is about to confront Anthony about this, his wife and the other adults look on with worried smiles on their faces. The father then smiles and tells Anthony in a horror-tinged voice, "...But it's good you're making it snow. A real good thing. And tomorrow... tomorrow's gonna be a... real good day!"
Read more about this topic: It's A Good Life (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)