Sturgeon’s career was at a high point in these years thanks to the very favourable reaction to his 1953 novel More than Human and to the short fiction he published in 1953 and thereafter. But this long-awaited success was obstructed by serious episodes of writer’s block in 1955 and again in 1958. Volume X shows Sturgeon doing some of his best and most powerful work in major stories like The Man Who Lost the Sea,
The Comedian’s Children,
A Touch of Strange, and The Graveyard Reader.