Alan Edward Nourse 37 min read

He wakes near dark, trembling, heart sinking, he should never have slept. In the gloom, straining to hear them, he knows without a flicker of doubt that they are going to kill him.

Alan E. Nourse's 1963 story is a taut, paranoid first-contact and horror tale. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a tense cat-and-mouse story where a hunted man flees an implacable, hidden enemy, and the dark door of the title opens onto a terror stranger than any pursuit.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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