The Eyes Have It

A man finds a strange book left behind by a previous tenant, and what he reads will haunt him. The book is a manual for alien visitors to Earth, and its clinical, detached descriptions of human beings are horrifying: we are depicted as grotesque creatures who rotate our teeth, periodically shed our skin, and survive perfectly well despite losing limbs and organs. But the real terror isn't the aliens described in the manual. It's the question that gnaws at the narrator with increasing desperation: how does he know he's not one of them? How does anyone? Written with Philip K. Dick's signature paranoia and dark humor, this short story is a compact nightmare that asks whether identity is something you can trust, or something that can be taken from you without your knowing. The aliens are among us, the book insists. But the story's true horror lies in making you wonder if you've always been one of them.