The Last Monster

He is the last of his kind, and he has been alone for longer than human civilization has existed. On a dying world, four astronauts from Earth discover Irgi, an ancient creature whose race once ruled the stars, now the sole survivor of a civilization that burned itself to ash. He holds the secret of immortality in his blood, and the men from Earth want it. What follows is a strange, melancholy tale of first contact across an unimaginable gulf of time and difference, where the monster may be more human than the humans who have come to bleed him. Gardner F. Fox, who would go on to create the Justice League and reshape comic book mythology, wrote this novella in 1945 with a poet's sense of loss and a pulp writer's eye for the strange and terrible. It is weird fiction in the truest sense: a meditation on what it means to exist when everything you knew is gone, and what price the last survivor pays for enduring.