The paper graphically described the latest of the many horrible events which had been enacted upon the Earth in the last six months. The headlines screamed that Six Corners, a little hamlet in Pennsylvania, had been wiped out by the Horror. Another told of a Terror in the Amazon Valley which had sent the natives down the river in babbling fear.

Simak spent most of his professional career working in Minnesota for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, but nowadays he’s remembered mostly for his science fiction writing – novels like Mastodonia (1978), The Visitors (1980), Project Pope (1981), Where the Evil Dwells (1982), Special Deliverance (1982), Highway of Eternity (1986). But Simak had a long, long career – as witness this story, which first saw print in 1932, when Simak was 28. You can see that Simak grew a great deal as a writer over his lifetime – or perhaps the original editor had at it a bit too roughly with his blue pencil. But even so – it’s Simak and it’s got a quality that rises over that …