Dave Dryfoos 16 min read

Naomi Heckscher stands frozen just inside old Cappy's cabin, where her husband has just found the beloved widower dead in bed, the first shock in a chilling colonial mystery.

Dave Dryfoos's 1953 story is an eerie first-contact and horror tale. Atmospheric, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a creeping story where the death of a kindly neighbor on an alien-planet farm colony opens onto something strange and menacing, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds mounting dread beneath the surface of frontier homesteading.

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).