R. A. Lafferty 12 min read

'Is there anything you want to make disappear?' nine-year-old Clarence asks his mother. He's built a disappearer from a beer can and two bits of red cardboard: look, blink, and it's gone.

R. A. Lafferty's 1962 story is a gleeful, tall-tale psi-powers and social-SF comedy. Funny, inventive, wonderfully odd. Read it for prime early Lafferty, a small-town family, a boy's impossible gadget, and the delightful chaos of a whole week of things vanishing and coming back.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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