King of the Shadows was written in 1964. Most humans are killed in a pandemic caused by microscopic life from space, a topic of speculation in 1963 for Time and the Wall Street Journal. Baranabas Quain is one of the rare survivors: his odyssey to find fellow survivors in a post-apocalyptic United States is unusually timely and hopeful as he meets a set of improbable characters adjusting to a world with few people. Wallace Macfarlane authored more than 80 short stories published in Analog, Galaxy, If, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post between 1950 and 1975. He also wrote two novels, which were not published. This is one of them.