Sweet Tooth

When newspaper reporter Dexter Foote goes to cover a "fallen star" in rural upstate New York, he expects a slow news day. What he finds are two enormous, metallic aliens who have a very specific appetite: they eat cars. The VEMs (Vehicle-Eating Monsters, as the military eventually acronyms them) are gentle as lambs otherwise, but put a convertible in their path and it's crunch time. Young's 1963 gem plays like Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Graduate, filtered through the anxieties of an America that had just fallen in love with the interstate highway system. The real joke isn't the monsters; it's watching the U.S. Army try to develop a "counter-measure strategy" against creatures that just want to eat hubcaps. It's a sharp, quick read that uses sci-fi absurdity to ask what would actually matter if something truly alien showed up in our parking lots. The answer, it turns out, is our cars.