Welcome to Stories from Among the Stars.

You're listening to The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, narrated by Katie Eric. Chapter 3. Devon by night. Present day. But where did the book eaters come from?

There is no evidence to suggest that they are a mutant strain of evolution at work, and humanity

took thousands of years to develop paper-making technology.

The book eaters themselves tell wildly unbelievable legends of the collector,

an extraterrestrial being who created them to look humanoid and who placed them on

earth for the purpose of gathering knowledge, book-eating, and sampling human experiences,

mind-eating.

But the collector, so the bizarre story goes, never returned. Hence the eaters remain,

remnants of an abandoned alien science project. Amarinda Patel, Paper and Flesh, A Secret History.

Devon dreamed of hell, as she often did these days.

Some humans had sexual fantasies in their nightly visions, or nightmares about going to job interviews naked.

Her dream was neither, though it had elements of both. It always began with the ground opening

beneath her feet into a broad tunnel streaked with lava. Cartoonish, that. She fell without

resistance or surprise and landed on her knees in a subterranean pit worthy of Dante's Inferno,

a book that she'd once tried to eat but had spat out

because it tasted of brimstone and bile. She'd never had much of a palette for classics.

A voice spoke from the blackness, telling her plightly that she would suffer for her sins.

And she laughed with relief until she cried. A whip cracked comically, landing across her shoulders,

and Devin woke abruptly with searing pain in her spine. She was lying on the bathroom floor,

head twisted at an angle, and neck protesting with a stubborn ache. Her phone, when she checked it,

read 12.04 a.m. Devvin uncurled herself and threw up a belly's worth

...