Henry Kuttner 30 min read

In the fog-haunted high Cordilleras of Peru, the frightened priest Fra Rafael tells the scientist White of impossible things he has seen, and the mystery of the seven virginal young girls of Huascan.

Henry Kuttner's 1954 story is an atmospheric horror and psi-powers tale. Eerie, dread-soaked, superbly told. Read it for a chilling Kuttner mood-piece set in the mist-shrouded Andes, where science meets something ancient and inexplicable, in a well-turned golden-age tale of creeping supernatural dread, its title drawn from Swinburne's poem of the quiet garden of death.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

30 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).