Forgotten Books: Terror Station - Dwight V. Swain

I guess I've been watching too many of those 1950s science fiction movies lately, because I was in the mood to read something along those lines. What better place to look for it than the pages of the SF digests from that era, especially those published by William Hamling?

Well, you could check out a publishing company called Armchair Fiction, which has reprinted a lot of short novels from those magazines. That's where I read Dwight V. Swain's TERROR STATION, which appeared originally in the September 1955 issue of IMAGINATIVE TALES, with a cover by Harold W. Macauley that matches the story quite well. I met Dwight Swain at a convention in Oklahoma City in 1991, a year before he passed away, and I'm glad I got a chance to talk to him, even briefly. I hadn't read much of his work at the time, but I've since read quite a bit and enjoyed most of it.

TERROR STATION, like a lot of those movies I was talking about, is set in the desert, although it involves a military base, not a small town. The protagonist is Carl Stone, the head of security for the base, where some top-secret research is going on. Stone is driving back to the base one night, returning from a trip to Washington, when a terrified woman runs out in front of his headlights, an opening a little reminiscent of Mickey Spillane's KISS ME, DEADLY.

The story isn't the least bit Spillane-like after that, however. The woman is being pursued by a tentacle-waving alien. Stone tries to rescue her, but she's cut down by a death ray. The alien gets away. But when Stone takes the woman's body to the base, nobody believes him about the alien, and he's accused of murdering her. Everybody on the base is on edge and paranoid and acting out of character, including the director of the research project, who's Stone's old friend, and the base psychiatrist, who happens to be Stone's former girlfriend. Could it be that the evil aliens are influencing their minds? Why has a mysterious giant tower been erected on the base while Stone was gone? What are those strange lights in the sky?

I think you can probably answer all those questions without even reading the book, but if you're looking for a groundbreaking plot, TERROR STATION isn't the place. If you're in the mood for a slam-bang, two-fisted, hardboiled SF adventure yarn with a satisfying ending, this one is just about perfect. Swain really knew how to keep a story racing along for 30,000 words with hardly a pause for breath, and old geezer that I am, I had a great time reading it. I have a big stack of these Armchair Fiction double volumes, which are made to look a lot like the old Ace Doubles, so expect more posts like this to be showing up in the near future.