David Loring is an artist engaged to the luminous Janice Reece, and life is good until the morning she returns home shaken, claiming a stranger invaded her apartment. He meant her no harm, she insists. But David's jealousy flares hotter than reason. Then the strangers multiply. Something is watching them from the hills above Malibu, and their interest in Janice feels less like coincidence and more like possession. Long, writing at the height of Cold War paranoia, weaves a strange tale of marital suspicion meets Martian invasion, where the line between alien abduction and emotional betrayal blurs into something genuinely unsettling. The prose has that peculiar 1960s earnestness, and Long's imagination runs wild with implications that never quite cohere into satisfying sci-fi. But the real horror isn't the Martians. It's the question that haunts David: does Janice belong to him, or did she never really belong to him at all?
