James V. McConnell 20 min read

A nobody wakes beside the most famous woman alive, in an emptied world, unable to remember how either happened.

Charles opens his eyes next to a screen idol who was unattainable a year ago, in a deserted luxury hotel, in a city that feels wrong. McConnell (a real psychologist by trade) builds a dreamlike, disquieting post-catastrophe mood, doling out its answers as slowly as its dazed narrator can grasp them. Less action than atmosphere: a meditation on loneliness, desire, and what's left when the world empties out. Read it for an eerie, melancholy entry in the last-people-on-Earth tradition, with a psychologist's eye for the mind under strain.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

20 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas