Sunday, May 03, 2020

The House That Stood Still by A.E. van Vogt

(pb; 1950)

From the back cover

“Stephens had to solve the mystery of the centuries-old house that stood still─or Earth would be destroyed!

“At first Allison Stephens knew only that there was something strange about the house and its sinister inhabitants. Then he stumbled onto the spaceship and learned of the catastrophe that threatened to obliterate the universe from the heavens─a catastrophe that the masked immortals from the house that stood still could prevent.

“But the immortals planned instead to escape to another planet─leaving Earth to its terrible fate. Only one of them, the unearthly Mistra Lannett, agreed to help save the world. During the fateful days that followed, Stephens and Mistra met the challenge to defeat the most indestructible aliens the world had ever known!”


Review

House is an excellent, fun thriller-science-fiction-P.I.-mystery novel, its prose lean for the most part, always compelling and fast-paced, with constant twists, turns and mysterious identities. This is a hard-to-set-down genre hybrid work, one that I read in short period of time, and one that is great enough to be kept on my bookshelf (I don’t keep most books), a high bar work for the genres it straddles.

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