This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Kenton J. Stanfield is a prospector for the Venus Crystal Company, working a planet of grey mud, viscous rain, and carnivorous vegetation, where the native reptilian Aklo people wage a losing war against human extraction of the sacred crystals.
In a clearing he sees a large crystal lying beside a dead man. He walks toward it and strikes something that is not there.
The barrier is invisible, seamless, and total. Feeling his way along it, Stanfield realises he has walked into a maze he cannot see, built by an intelligence he does not understand, and that the entrance has closed somewhere behind him. His food is limited. His air supply is not infinite. And a crowd of Aklo gathers outside the walls to watch, in no hurry at all.
Written in 1936 and published posthumously in Weird Tales, this collaboration between H. P. Lovecraft and the young Kenneth Sterling is the last piece of fiction Lovecraft worked on, and one of the earliest and purest treatments of the invisible-maze idea in science fiction. Told entirely as a dying man's log, it is claustrophobic, hopeless, and coldly plausible. This unabridged audiobook edition presents the complete original text.
