The events of The Night the Heads Came take place in a town south of New York, a location that is refreshing partly because of its very familiarity and partly because of the sensible manner in which Sleator presents his story. The novel has none of the usual cliches of the small-town-beset-byaliens plot which has often been the stuff of endless bad fiction and motion pictures. Sleator shows respect for the minds of ordinary people in presenting a town where people behave with intelligence and fortitude when confronted with new experiences. The town's adults do not all become complete idiots who ignore the warnings of teenagers, the police chief is smart and pays attention to the evidence, scientists examine an alien artifact and do not dismiss it, and there are no mob scenes of panicked fools fleeing the evil aliens that they had refused to believe existed. Instead...