Ray Cummings 1 hr 6 min read

There is nothing wrong or weird about the Florida Everglades at night, not to Allen Nixon, born at the swamp's edge, paddling calmly through the star-mirrored bayou. At least, not yet.

Ray Cummings's 1948 story is an atmospheric first-contact and horror tale of the swamp. Vivid, creeping golden-age pulp. Read it for a moody story where a man utterly at home in the night-time Everglades meets an invasion of little monsters, and the familiar bayou turns strange and menacing around him.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 6 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams