Believing

Zenna Henderson is best known for her stories of The People, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. The People, a group of human-appearing aliens, escaped the destruction of their home world only to be shipwrecked on Earth, where they struggled to hide their extra abilities. These stories were collected into one volume in 1995 when NESFA Press published Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson. During the same period, Henderson published an equal number of non-People stories. Like the stories of The People, they range from comforting to unnerving. Fans of The People will recognize the same underlying belief in the goodness of people and other beings as they struggle for a chance at a better future. These stories have a common theme — belief. A girl believes that the hills are lost beasts and leads them home; a boy believes he can fight evil with a pocket piece made from Popsicle sticks; a boy believes he can build a noise-eating machine — with fatal results. Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson contains every non-People story, all long out of print. Thirty-three of the stories in this volume are from her collections, The Anything Box and Holding Wonder. The remaining five stories and three poems were previously published in other magazines and anthologies. Welcome to Zenna Henderson’s world.