The Grey Ones by J B Priestley

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A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around him no longer look quite as human as they once did. In his account there are no apparitions, no rattling chains, only the slow, unnerving sense that certain very ordinary people are quietly working to empty life of colour, choice, and meaning. As he talks, the calm, professional office itself begins to feel strangely less reassuring. The Grey Ones was first published in 1952 and later collected in J. B. Priestley’s The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort (1953). It stands…