Pillar of Fire by Ray Bradbury

William Lantry wakes in a future that has buried not only him, but the whole language of death he once knew. In Salem, graveyards are being dismantled, corpses are incinerated in a gleaming public furnace, and a cheerful society built on trust, cleanliness, and progress has erased murder, fear, and the supernatural from memory. To Lantry, the last dead man on Earth, that sterile perfection is an insult—and a target. Stealing a man's identity, he slips into the city and into the Incinerator itself, where reverent ritual masks a machinery of destruction. What begins as infiltration becomes sabotage: he kills, lies, and engineers an explosion that tears through the Salem flue and exposes the fragility of a world that cannot imagine evil. As he moves through libraries, morgues, and the streets below, Lantry discovers that forbidden authors, dark legends, and even the word "police" have been scrubbed away. But he also learns that innocence can be weaponized, and that his own hatred may be enough to make night frightening again. In this chilling tale of horror and revenge, one undead outsider declares war on a civilization determined to deny the dead. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.