Termush

Termush is a hotel on the Atlantic coast where a small number of wealthy people bought shelter before the bombs fell. The rooms are comfortable, the meals are served, and the Management sends out reconnaissance patrols and issues bulletins about radiation levels. The guests are told when it is safe to walk on the terrace.

Then the bulletins start leaving things out. Guests who ask questions are sedated. Survivors from outside the perimeter, people who made no arrangement and paid no fee, begin arriving at the gates, and the residents must decide whether the shelter they purchased extends to anyone else.

Sven Holm published this Danish novella in 1967, at the height of Cold War civil-defence planning, and it reads now less as a bomb story than as a study of what a group of comfortable people will agree to in order to stay comfortable. Narrated by one resident whose careful, reasonable account keeps slipping. Translated by Sylvia Clayton and reissued by Faber with an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer.