Stephen Marlowe 19 min read

It started with a load of potatoes: two truckers stop at a lonely farmhouse for a return load as a storm gathers, and take aboard something they will wish they had left behind.

Stephen Marlowe's 1956 story is a tense, atmospheric first-contact and horror tale. Sharp, creepy golden-age SF. Read it for a lean, effective yarn of ordinary working men who unknowingly pick up an alien menace on a dark rainy night, building quiet, mounting dread from the most mundane of beginnings.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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