It began with a dead cat on the fire escape. For Ellen Tighe, a young woman clinging to decency in San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, it was just another unpleasant reminder that life in The Tenderloin was never easy. But as strange noises echo through the halls and the police shrug off wild reports of green-skinned men eating live mice, Ellen’s world teeters between routine reality and impossible nightmare. What hides behind her neighbors’ locked doors? Why does the man in 410 watch her so closely? And what, exactly, is waiting inside her own apartment?
Elisabeth R. Lewis weaves this story like a slow-burn fuse, turning the everyday into the eerie and the familiar into the alien. Know Thy Neighbor mixes urban realism with uncanny horror, giving us a heroine whose fears feel uncomfortably real until the unthinkable steps into view. Written during the golden age of short science fiction, it channels post-war anxiety, loneliness, and distrust into something that still resonates today: the fear that the threat isn’t from another planet—it’s living right next door.
