Jerry Sohl 18 min read

Washing the breakfast dishes, Alice McNearby sees her dog Dobie sneaking up to the house and knows he's killed again, one more step toward the wild spell it will throw her husband into.

Jerry Sohl's 1955 story is a taut, eerie horror and psi-powers tale of rural dread. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens in ordinary farm life and darkens by degrees, where a killing dog, a violent husband, and a strange power draw toward a chilling reckoning.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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