The Thing in the Truck — Inside the Classic

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In Category - Other Worlds

Authors: Marlowe, Stephen, 1928-2008 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2021 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Science fiction; Short stories; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Truck drivers -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 7,546

Reading time 33 min

Text sections 1

This digital edition of The Thing in the Truck — Inside the Classic is described by source-level measurements including 7,546 words, 33 min estimated reading time, and 1 detected text section.

The text analysis averages about 12.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Science fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #65676

A truck driver and his partner haul a cheap load of potatoes from a farmer whose storage barn was hit by a mysterious explosion. As strange noises and a glowing transformation unfold, the potatoes prove to be more than they seem, leading to a violent confrontation and an otherworldly departure.

Editorial Edition Score 4.4/5

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg65676

Read the Text

There was a smell in there. Not a potato smell. To this day I still can't say what it was. But it was a funny smell and it made the short hairs on the back of my neck feel all cold and prickly-like.

I lit a match and swore. Joe was right. There just weren't any potatoes, I don't care _who_ loaded them.

But there _was_ something back there.

Call it jelly, if you want. I saw it and I can't do better. Say, two or three tons of quivering jelly filling up the center of the floor of the van.

I was carrying a lighted match into the van with me. It burned my fingers. I lit another one and slowly approached the jelly. It didn't seem to have any color, so it took on the orange glowing color of the flaming match. It pulsed. I went near it, then stopped. There were still a few potatoes on the floor of the van, after all. I stood by while the jelly rolled sluggishly toward them. The potatoes were enveloped. In a minute there weren't any potatoes.

Then the jelly-thing stopped quivering. I came close and touched it gingerly with one finger. It burned. I withdrew my hand.

Just then I heard the sound of glass breaking. A section of the jelly had blubbered over against the van's small front window, smashing it. I didn't think a soft jelly would have the strength.

"Harry!" Joe shouted. It was like a shout of animal fear. I heard the sound of more glass breaking. The rear window of the cab, I thought. I hopped over the rear tongue of the van and sped around to the cab.

Joe was sitting there, smoking a cigarette.

"What's the matter?" I asked him. "What happened?"

"Nothing's the matter," he said. "You want to drive or want me to drive?"

"You just now yelled."

"Me? You sure I yelled, Harry?"

A car sped by, following its headlight beams. "Window's broke," I said.

"Is it?" Joe Loftus asked me in mild surprise. "Is it now? That's what you get for trying to shift those potatoes around in the middle of the trip."

"Potatoes!" I yelled.

"Hell, yeah. Potatoes. Hey, what's the matter with you, anyhow?"

"Potatoes," I said. "All right, so go take a look."

Joe scowled but went. In a little while I heard the tongue and doors slamming and the chain being dragged across. Joe came back and gave me a long funny look. "Yeah, potatoes," he said.

I didn't push it. We'd been on the road a long time today. Sometimes the road can get to you like that. Maybe you read something about highway hypnotism. If you're driving too long on a good road like the Montauk Highway or one of the throughways, after a while you get to see things which aren't there or don't see things which are there. It can be plenty trouble but it wasn't going to hurt me tonight if I imagined a return load of Long Island potatoes was a big glob of jelly.

I scratched my head. "Highway's got you, huh?" Joe said. He knew the symptoms. "Tell you what, Harry? Why don't you sleep it off? I feel pretty good. I can take her in."

I thanked Joe and climbed up on the slab bunk in the rear of the cab. The window was broken back there, all right. You couldn't argue about that. But it was too dark to see into the van, except that I could see the van window was likewise shattered. I drifted off sleepily, not thinking about it much. Joe was a good driver, one of the best. Maybe when I opened my eyes we'd be in the city, heading for one of the big wholesale produce markets....

It was raining when I awoke. Thunder rolled and rumbled and then split like a pine board overhead. Lightning was stabbing at the sky.

"Joe?" I said, sleepily.

He grunted a wordless answer.

"We near the city yet?"

"You only slept maybe half an hour, chum. Why don't you catch another forty?"

I said: "That's real white of you, pal."

The truck lurched around a turn. The rain beat down. I opened my eyes and looked down past Joe's head. Just then a flash of lightning lit up the night. I caught a glimpse of a narrow two-lane asphalt road and stunted scrub pine growing in what looked like sandy ground.

"Hey!" I shouted. "This isn't the Montauk Highway. This isn't the way back. What's going on?"

"Just get some sleep, will you?" Joe said. "Detour back there."

"Wasn't any detour when we came out."

"Well, there's a detour now."

Continue Reading →

The story opens with a mundane trucking job: Joe Loftus and the narrator pick up a cheap load of potatoes from a farmer whose storage barn was hit by "a bitty explosion." The farmer admits the potatoes are damaged but offers a low price. The narrator, focused on profit, agrees. This ordinary setup—complete with hand-painted signs, coffee from the farmer's wife, and sacks loaded by hand—quickly gives way to unease. Half an hour into the drive, Joe hears something and insists on stopping. The narrator dismisses it as shifting sacks, but Joe is scared. The tension escalates when the truck itself begins to glow and transform, revealing that the potatoes are not what they seem.

From Potatoes to Premonition

The opening pages establish a gritty, blue-collar realism. The narrator's voice is laconic and practical: he notes the cheap price, the season's market, and the physical labor of loading sacks. Joe, by contrast, is more intuitive—he hears a noise and grows frightened. The dialogue is terse: "Stop the truck." "What for?" The reader is grounded in the cab of a semi-trailer on Montauk Highway, with heavy clouds and fading light. This concrete setting makes the first hint of the supernatural—Joe's "premonition"—all the more jarring. The story's strength lies in how it withholds explanation, letting the reader share the narrator's growing unease.

The Truck Transforms

Later, the truck's "square lines" begin to flow and shift, coalescing into a "gleaming silver globe." The narrator describes it as "like a slow fade on the TV." This simile roots the fantastic in 1950s technology. The transformation is witnessed by the narrator, Joe, and a mysterious woman who appears. The woman urges Joe to kill the narrator, and a violent struggle ensues. The narrator fights for his life, using a monkey wrench. The scene is chaotic, with rain, sand, and desperate grappling. The woman's cry—"Kill him, Joe!"—reveals that the aliens (or transformed humans) are willing to murder to keep their secret. The narrator escapes, but only just.

Aftermath and Ambiguity

After the sphere rises on a pillar of flame, the narrator finds Joe's body: "a dry husk of a body, hardly recognizable, as if some great power had taken Joe and twisted him." Nearby are "a few hundred dry husky things" that he eventually recognizes as burned potatoes. The woman is gone. The narrator's final explanation—that the police attributed Joe's death to lightning—is deliberately thin. The story ends with the narrator alive but haunted, unable to fully understand what happened. The ambiguity is key: the reader is left with the same unanswered questions as the narrator. The potatoes, the explosion, the transformation—none are fully explained, which adds to the story's eerie power.

Voice and Structure

The story is told in first-person by an unnamed truck driver. His voice is colloquial and direct, with short sentences and a matter-of-fact tone. He describes events as they happen, without foreshadowing or literary flourishes. This plain style makes the fantastic elements more believable. The structure is linear: setup, strange noise, transformation, fight, escape, aftermath. The pacing accelerates as the danger increases. The story uses a classic science-fiction trope—the alien disguised as something ordinary—but grounds it in a specific, working-class milieu. The potatoes are not just a MacGuffin; they are a tangible link between the mundane and the cosmic.

This story rewards a first reading that pays close attention to the narrator's observations and the gradual shift from the ordinary to the inexplicable. The potatoes, the farmer's story, and Joe's fear all plant seeds that bloom into the final, unsettling image of the husks. The reader is left to decide whether the woman and Joe were aliens all along, or transformed by the sphere. The story's brevity and tight focus make it a quick, effective read that lingers in the mind.

That old potato haul still lingers with me—how something so ordinary could turn so strange before vanishing. Reading it, I remembered the quiet ache in The Enormous Word — Text and Context, the way meaning shifts under your hands. Both left me staring at nothing, half-wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing. The Enormous Word — Text and Context sits nearby, dog-eared, patient, like an old friend waiting for me to return.