American author Jack Finney announced his major thematic material early in his career, in the short story "I'm Scared": "Haven't you noticed," the narrator comments, "... on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present""

Indeed, Finney carried out something of a one-man crusade against the present in many of his novels and numerous short stories and in their movie adaptations, and won a cult following for his novels The Body Snatchers and Time and Again. Finney's narrator in "I'm Scared" goes on to remark: "Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us all; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time." For Finney, however, the breaking apart...