John Lymington Classic Sci-fi

The nightmare that started with the dreadful, mind-draining heat and continued with one death after another. The Experimental Spiders were sent to Earth from another planet—that meant a race superior to man was planning to make an invasion. And in the meantime, the spiders were destroying everything they touched—eating men alive—making the result of the invasion almost a foregone conclusion.

Strange storms suddenly appear out of (literally) a clear blue sky, and disappear just as rapidly. And only one scientist, Nigel Rhodes, understands what's going on. The result will be that in five days time the spin of the Earth will for a short period slow down, almost certainly bringing humanity to an end. How is he to convince people of the simple, horrifying, inevitable truth?

The shadows gave the impression that one moment the people were there, and the next, that they were nothing but shade pools. They were trapped, in the one oasis of peace in a world gone mad. Surrounding them were people who thought and acted like savages. But at least they were human, more or less. It was the other thing that brought horror - the non-human, inexorable thing, slowly creeping...

It was just a small, ordinary seaside town. A strange, eerie feeling began to make itself felt among the people. Footprints appeared in the sand. Gates were opened as if by an invisible hand, furniture was knocked over. A full-scale invasion was in progress from an enemy who could be behind you or by your side. And the one man who knew the secret realized that things had gotten beyond his control.

The missiles came from a long way out in space. Maybe there were people in them. Things from somewhere else. Man always thought he was the Only Man in all the million worlds in a Universe that might itself be one of a million. Now men from one of those other worlds had come to Earth. That was all that had happened. But who were they, the night-comers? And what horror had they brought with them?

Strange objects were seen floating in the sky, followed by a terrifying scream of sound that filled the air all around the world. The people were told that the objects were just high cloud formations, or spots before the eyes. And the scream? Just a scientific device that had gone astray. The truth, however, was very different.

He was the first victim of the Sleep Eaters – a mental invasion force that attacked him as his mind travelled over the edges of sleep. Their plan was to clear Earth of Man so as to pave the way for a physical invasion. And the method they employed was a simple one: they persuaded Man to use his own genius for self-destruction …

John Brunt was an irresponsible, thrill-seeking globetrotter. No adventure was too outlandish for him. Then he met Professor David Packard, who made the most outlandish proposal of all … to send John all the way to Heaven—by killing him and then bringing him back from the dead. And suppose Packard couldn’t bring him back? Suppose he really was dead and had to stay in this world of madness forever?

A fine summer’s morning that was just like any other. Nothing unusual about old house, except that in the heat haze it seemed hover a couple of feet above the ground. Outside a great crowd had gathered, people who had been drawn to the village because they were puzzled and downright scared. All of them staring until the nightmare that had been forecast actually became a terrible, terrible reality.

Reverend David James discovered that a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan and calling up the dead. In his mansion, scientist Harry Royce was employing electronic devices to reach the outer limits of the Universe. When the invasion began, two things became clear: It could not be stopped, and once it was completed, there would be no sane person left on Earth.

It began with the sound of a beating heart ... four thousand feet below the surface of the earth. Something was living down there, in a strange void that refused to respond to science’s probings: an impossible life living in an impossible place. And now that life was awakening, stirring under the probe of men who were unable to refrain from questioning the unexplained ...

The V2 rocket had been lost for nearly thirty years when a piece of its metal came into the hands of the only occupier of the bomb site. Suddenly, the metal began to come alive, to terrify the holder and the man who had come to find out why this whole deserted place had somehow gathered to itself the mark of Cain ...

A small English village wavers on the edge of destruction. It seems that someone can make Weston Abbas disappear and reappear at will. A close community becomes disparate and nearly self-destructive. And nature turns chaotic. One man, Joss Darke, believes he has the answer, barring one possibility … And if an extra-terrestrial force is responsible, then Weston Abbas is doomed to a painful death.

When John bought to the inn, Fear was host. Fear of a man upstairs, a guest locked in, who would not speak or eat or sleep or move; yet from outside whose locked door the silence moved with weird sensations of life growing within. Life that seemed to have come with the landing of UFOs in the river mist. How can you get away from the edge when you know you must?

The Government decided that Christopher Jay was an enemy of the people and that meant he had to die. He became a casualty of the New Capital Punishment Act, and was duly executed. But this was also the age of the Blind Scientist, the Transplanter, the Organ Switchers and the breeders of babies in bottles. Once Jay’s organs had been harvested, they found some very interesting places to resume life.

Something peculiar was happening in the grounds of Dr Liskard’s remote country home. It was surrounded by enormous, near-prehistoric creatures that could only be seen through the telescope he usually used to study the stars. Something equally terrifying was happening below ground. Something that might just spell the end for humanity.

A Cornish village abandoned in the middle of the night … a terror-stricken community that dare not explain its mysterious behaviour … a hotel guest who finds an enormous spider in her bath … Silently, relentlessly, an army of spiders spins its web of fear, and the people of Dormouth are powerless to halt an invasion that threatens the world …

David Howard arrives at Laxham Rectory to take up his new post as curate. The village is rife with rumours of the light that seems to emanate from the rectory and even the vicar is unusually tense and expectant. When a wall of the rectory collapses, leaving a single brick suspended in mid-air, everybody realises that the power surrounding them is of no earthly origin.

Returning to England from India, John Waring was trying to unravel the connection between the stone circles on Bodmin Moor and the terrifying phenomena he experienced at an old farmhouse? Between an Indian djinn and a remote Cornish farmhouse? Between the Maclains and alien beings from another time and place? Between earthly beliefs and a whole new way of being?

What was the secret of the flat black rock, unlike any other rock in the Cornish landscape where it lay? For generations, the Stone at Trelynn had exerted some malevolent kind of influence on the Baswell family. And now the children could see lights shimmering in its depths. But even when it gave up its secret, nobody really knew whether the danger within the Stone was past … or still to come.

The old vicarage in a small Cornish fishing town is at the centre of some very mysterious happenings—the unexplained appearance of a small, female figure, crudely modelled out of children’s plasticine; a weird, hypnotic force that exhilarates and lures; optical illusions that place familiar objects where they should not be. Is the human race being used in some kind of extraterrestrial experiment?

What happens when you suddenly become aware of a stranger walking around inside your head, asking questions to which you’ve known the answers all your life? What happens when you realise that the telepathic visitor is an alien, whose purpose is invasion? The only people who believed John English were his own family, who were themselves being prepared as hosts for the invasion commanders.

As long ago as 1937, the successful inventor and scientist Sir Arthur Barnes created a device which generated electricity on a practical scale without the need of fuel or machinery or power distribution lines. When he died a year later in an accident, he died with his secret intact. No generator was visible, and any notes he had ever made had been hidden or destroyed. Why?

Professor Odds had a theory: if we travel in a flash while we dream, we could do the same when awake. He discovered a way of lifting his mind and landed himself on another planet. A friend, Richard Trenton, followed, but he was younger and anxious to get back to the woman he’d left behind. He began to worry still more when an alien woman of great power in her land, chose him for a lover.

The Night Spiders and twenty-seven more stories to chill the blood and take the breath away. The night the madness came, the professor was in his laboratory, as usual. He told me, calmly, that a number of men from outer space had started landing just over to the south. “Of course,” he said, “they’re not quite the sort of creatures we’re used to; they’re still in the fourth dimension.”