Sam Merwin 29 min read

A comfortable middle-aged man driving through his old hometown finds the road, and the world, has quietly changed around him.

Sam Merwin's 1951 story jolts the affluent, well-lunched Coulter out of his reverie when a bump on the highway leaves him on a different road, in a subtly wrong reality. An unsettling alternate-worlds tale that turns a nostalgic drive into a slow-dawning nightmare. Read it for eerie, understated 1950s SF about a man who did not, in fact, want a second chance at his life.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

29 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).