Jim Harmon 37 min read

Sam Collins flashes the undertaker a healthy smile, but old Doc Candle grips his arm and says, 'I'm going to bury you, Sam Collins', the first joke Collins has ever known him to make.

Jim Harmon's 1962 story is an eerie, atmospheric first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story steeped in the heat and shadow of a dying small town, where an undertaker's grim promise proves the opening of something far stranger than a joke.

In its time

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

Reading it

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