Know Thy Neighbor

The Tenderloin's crumbling walls hide more than poverty. When Ellen Tighe finds a dead cat on her fire escape, she tells herself it's just another grim casualty of the neighborhood. But then she sees it: a ghastly green thing writhing in the incinerator chute, something that shouldn't exist, something that looks back at her with recognition. In her decaying building, every door becomes a question. Every muffled sound through the walls could be ordinary life or something else entirely. As Ellen's fear spirals into obsession, she starts watching her neighbors with new eyes, searching for the telltale signs of what might be hiding among them. Is she losing her mind, or is something far more sinister wearing human faces? Lewis builds dread with careful precision, turning the familiar architecture of apartment living into a maze of suspicion and dread. This is Cold War paranoia given supernatural form: the terror not of the foreign enemy, but of the neighbor next door whose smile doesn't quite reach their eyes. For readers who want early paranoid horror that prefigures modern body horror, this novella will linger in your peripheral vision long after you've turned the last page.