Tabby

Fred is three weeks into a botanical expedition on a remote Pacific island when a flying saucer appears over the treeline and releases a swarm of green flies. He documents everything in letters to his sister, and what he watches unfold is terrifying: the insects, which the crew nicknames 'Tabby,' reproduce at impossible rates. Native spiders begin feeding on them exclusively, multiplying in response. Within days, the island's ecological balance shatters. But the real horror isn't the insects themselves, it's the question Fred can't stop asking: was this deliberate? Written in 1954 as a series of letters, Tabby captures the paranoid pulse of its era, where the cosmos feel hostile and 'first contact' might be an act of biological warfare. Marks builds dread through accumulation, letting readers watch a world tip toward catastrophe one letter at a time. It's a compact, unsettling portrait of what happens when we stumble into something bigger than ourselves and have no way to understand it.