Elegy

Captain Webber and his battered crew are running on fumes, fleeing the wreckage of war from Earth and Mars when Mr. Friden spots the impossible: a city on a barren asteroid. What first seems like madness becomes something far stranger as the ship draws near and the landscape resolves into lakes, farms, houses, cows, and a suburb so familiar it feels like memory made real. In this uncanny place, the ordinary and the impossible blur, and the men begin to wonder whether they have found refuge, hallucination, or an afterlife. Their landing leads them through a series of eerie, silent settings—shops, temples, hospitals, libraries, and cheerful homes—where people seem frozen like displays. Then they meet Mr. Greypoole, a polite Earthman who reveals the truth: they have arrived at Happy Glades, a lavish cemetery offering personalized eternal comfort in carefully maintained environments. As Greypoole explains the "Eternifier" and the business of preserving the dead in perfect domesticity, the story turns sharply from comic bewilderment to dark satire and horror. The crew's desperate hope for a new beginning collides with a final, chilling irony: this paradise was never meant for the living. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.