The Fearsome Touch of Death

Night becomes a living thing in this claustrophobic tale of one man's vigil with the dead. Adam Farrel died a stranger, unlamented and alone in his house of isolation. Falred, a man who barely knew the deceased, agrees to sit with the corpse through the darkness, an old custom he half-believes in and half-scorns. But as the hours stretch, as the silence grows teeth, as the shadows take shape, Falred discovers that the only thing more terrible than the dead is what the living mind conjures in the dark. Howard builds dread with surgical precision, each passing moment tightening the screws of paranoia until the final, devastating twist: in his terror, Falred mistakes his own hand for the dead man's touch, and the fear itself becomes lethal. It's a story about the fragility of sanity when confronted with mortality, about how the imagination can become the most dangerous enemy. One of Howard's finest, most psychologically acute horror pieces.