Encounter

by J. Hunter Holly

[Front Cover]"He Was A Destroyer From Another Planet---Bent On Mastery Of The World"[Back Cover]"The space ship came plummeting out of the sky---a soundless, streaking, purple glow, moving faster and faster until it ripped at the trees, crashed through them and struck sickeningly against a hill. Momentarily it flared brightly, then went out.It was not long after that the murders began---strange, inexplicable deaths, all victims found with their heads crushed as if their skulls had exploded outward.The trail of victims led from Arkansas to Tennessee, to Kentucky, Illinois and Michigan---sixteen unrelated people who had only one thing in All of their brains were withered, as if sucked dry of their contents...And somewhere wandered an evil stranger from another planet, his personality expanding, his brain power increasing, preparing for the inevitable encounter that could make him master of the world!"

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror

142 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Joan Carol Holly was a science fiction author who wrote under the pseudonym J. Hunter Holly in the late 1950s until the mid-1970s. Joan Holly also contributed stories for Roger Elwood's series of books and sci-fi magazines, under both her real name(Joan C. Holly) and her pseudonym (Joan Hunter Holly).

Joan died of lung cancer in 1982.

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

first cheap sci fi paperback I've ever picked up, and good enough for a day at the beach or a long plane ride. nothing kind blowing but well written

[Rafeeq O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

J. Hunter Holly's 1959 Encounter is one of those pieces of midcentury science fiction with aliens looking exactly--not with a tweaked skull shape, not with a different skin tint, but exactly--like the natives of Sol III. Still, once we overlook this hokeyness of the era, which indeed rather drains some of the "science" from the term "science fiction," the book indeed is an interesting and compelling mystery.

Something "wider than it [is] thick and...[is] all purple glow" (1962 Monarch paperback, page 8) flashes over the cabin of an upright but unlettered couple in "the Arkansas hills" (page 7), gives "an eerie feeling" to a Kenneth-Arnold-type private pilot (page 9), and then crashes in the woods, somehow without disintegration, remaining there "like a huge, solid wheel, one end stuck in the ground" (page 11). The hill people debate the sighting the next morning, with the husband asserting that "It weren't no airplane" because "It didn't make no noise," while the wife opines that "Maybe the motors was busted" (page 11). Could be--so they hike out and eventually find the one-seat flying saucer with its "rows of knobs and dials around the walls," and then, after following the drag track from the hatch, the "motionless and twisted" pilot (page 12).

Despite the uneasiness of their dog, the kindly rescuers nurse the invalid, whom the wife, from "thet story about the wheel" which "the preacher read" them, calls "Ezekiel" (page 14). Eventually, after "something made him stop" (page 18) in his hike to visit the cabin of their son and his wife "[f]arther up the hill" (page 10), the man observes the space pilot cause his saucer to self-destruct, and he realizes that "now...he [has] to report Ezekiel in the little town; he [has] to get his out of their woods" (page 20). But "[t]he next morning when the dog return[s] from his jaunt into the woods," he finds no familiar human response, only his people motionless on the floor, with "wet pools by their heads" (page 20). Dum dum dummmm...

This is no super plot-spoiler, by the way, as the book's back cover blurb already alerts us to a series of murders with burst skulls and whatnot. Still, I won't delve any further into this, as it will be for the reader to go from one situation to another, knowing what will happen and yet not knowing quite why, until we reach "the shady university town that nestle[s] near the state capital," where some after three years "still mourned the death of Professor Grayson," the "Assistant Head of the School of Psychology," who apparently "had no personal enemies; only friends, disciples, and more than a few dissenters" (page 31).

Here, just under a quarter of the way through the book, we at last meet the three main protagonists. The primary one is fellow psych professor Ray Harper, Grayson's "most ardent disciple," who still "couldn't understand some parts of the professor's teaching and had spent long evenings arguing with him" (page 31). With him is Grayson's daughter, Carol, who reveals "a sense of frankness and intelligence" (page 36) and rather appears to be Ray's girlfriend. And returning after five years away (page 31) is Ray's friend Will Poulton, a former reporter who is "going out on [his] own, as a serious writer" (page 32), but who also has been following the string of strange killings closely, even "visit[ing] the sites of the murders" where they started in the South (page 31). Ray, too, has kept up his similar, though non-traveling, "morbid hobby" (page 32) as well.

So there is the puzzle of the choosing of the victims: Grayson and the other "[s]ixteen unrelated people. Farmer, schoolteachers, a writer, a playboy, a state senator, a professor. No motive and no decent description of the killer" (page 32). There is the puzzle of the deaths, with skulls that, according to Will, "weren't just cracked open" but "exploded," as though the pressure had been "from the inside," though Ray considers this "too far out," since a solid enough "blow on the head could give [that] impression" (page 34). There also is "the telepathy angle--the parapsychology"--to which Ray remonstrates his friend, "We don't talk about that in this department. Professor Grayson has a reputation to be preserved" (page 33). And of course there is the up-and-coming yet mysterious stranger, Peter Kiel, who is so peculiarly magnetic and strong-willed...

As readers, we of course know what's going on long before the characters. We still don't quite know the why of it, though--the full truth of the beginning and, worse, where it is intended to lead. The author handles this well, however, and nowhere do we grumble, as sometimes happens in a mystery, about why this or that character fails to recognize some obvious clue. The actual happenings should be inscrutable, after all, at least outside of a science fiction novel with a flying saucer, and suggestions of the reality of telepathy.

J. Hunter Holly's Encounter thus was not earthshakingly new and artistic even in 1959, and some of its science is rather hokey--the idea of an alien world evolving a species physically indistinguishable from humans, for example--but it is an entertaining, menacing, and quite decently managed puzzle of around 3.5 or 4 stars that is still worth the read.

[Cormacjosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read during my vacation to Pennsic War XLV, this was a gift from a former co worker in 2005, and it sat on the shelf until 2016. Written in 1959 and surprisingly still in print, it is subject to the cliches and stereotypes of the time. All that being said it is delightful and tolerable vacation reading I got through it in 3 days flat. Recommended for light vacation reading and an amused laugh.

[SciFiOne · Rating 1 out of 5]

1986 grade F-

(I might have abandoned it.)