John Jakes 7 min read

Thompson stands in a plain room he has never seen, where an old bearded man behind a candlelit desk has watched him a very long time. 'You like horror stories. That's why you're here.'

John Jakes's 1952 story is a clever, chilling horror and social-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story that plays on our appetite for terror, where a man summoned before a strange old man is offered the most horrible story of all, with a sting in its telling.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry