Jerome Bixby 16 min read

They're all around us, the narrator warns, the slizzers, who look just like people, live among us unseen, and 'sliz' us; your best friend, your wife, the nice lady next door could be one.

Jerome Bixby's 1953 story is a chilling, paranoid first-contact tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a creepy, insidious story of alien impostors hidden in plain sight, from the author of 'It's a Good Life', a small, nasty gem of everyday suspicion and the horror of not knowing who is human.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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