Alastair Mayer

Edgar Allan Poe once said "Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them." Yet sleep - hibernation - may be the only way to make interstellar travel possible. Aboard the starship Raven, a crewman standing watch is surrounded by sleeping passengers and crew, and might go a little crazy. Or maybe the next person on watch just thinks he has.

This space-age re-imagining of Poe's classic "A Cask of Amontillado" was first published in the anthology "Full Throttle Space Tales #4: Space Horrors", edited by David Lee Summers.