Must have been nine, maybe eight, when first I learned about those Martians. Relying upon the primitive television devised by humans, my cousin Tamara and I were witness to the frightening arrivals of their deadly saucer ships, and we gaped at the destruction they wreaked, with their murderous heat beams…

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Long before she had been old enough to grasp the concept, she had heard the adults speak, in whispers, about the beasts. They whispered, as their parents, and their parents before them, had once shouted, because the years had worn them down, left…

SYNNØVE FISKER, Ph.D., mission specialist: It was almost like a ‘near-death’ experience. The weird light, and weird… everything, but it was the place we had just left? Earth, not out there? You could liken how we felt, to that. It was as though we three had never experienced a “normal”…

Rosalie pondered whether she should even attend Knapp’s funeral, so certain was she that she would make a spectacle of herself. It wasn’t vanity, so much; she was so convinced that she ought to have kept herself in far better shape, a task that seemed constantly out of her reach…

The last place Marko would ever have expected to meet the devil was in Saint Ronan’s Church. Even the New York police seemed forbidden to enter into its austere and mystical quarters, if their intention was to take him into custody; but an agent of pure evil, of course, would…

Jeph was twenty-eight years old when the principal called him into her office. He was neither a student, nor the father of one, at the Ramsey Middle School; he did not tremble at the prospect of an ugly confrontation with her, although she was his boss — at least, for…

“I want to see where Mister Death’s house is,” said Alaina Keane. “Will it be…” she struggled to find a more palatable term, then relented, “as spooky as I’m afraid it will be? Matty?” Fifteen-year-old Matthew Keane squinted into the distance, gauging just how far a distance they would need…

Society says: Bye-bye to the human, hello to the new animal, but up in the place I had never expected to find myself, I was saying bye-bye to the world. I wanted to stay longer, do what I do, catch them that I still can catch, but these fellows? Bad…

We’re doomed, her gaze said — even before she could give a literal voice to the bleak assessment of their prospects to her coworkers. When she could speak, she said: “They’re saying that it’s inevitable. …