The Night the Heads Came is a novel of considerable strengths, although marred by a few flaws in logic and lapses in common sense. One strength is that the story is told in the present tense but reads as though it were told in the past tense. Present-tense narration often has a heightened immediacy of action that crowds events together, but The Night the Heads Came has a slower narrative pace more akin to the traditional past tense. This subtle difference between expected and actual narrative speed confers a tone of originality on a story of alien invasion that has been a staple theme of science fiction ever since the publication of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898; see separate entry, Vol. 4). Much greater originality appears in a handling of the subject mercifully free of cliches. Sleator avoids them all: his adults are neither...