A young woman lying in a hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages, awaits the outcome of a surgical procedure performed by the State in a last-ditch attempt to make her look "normal."
An alien race comes to Earth, promising peace and sharing technology. Linguists Michael Chambers, Patricia Brody, and their team set out to translate the aliens' language, using a book whose title they deduce to be "To Serve Man."
Following a frantic phone call about a crashed spaceship on a winter night, state troopers Bill Padgett and Dan Perry try to determine who among the bus passengers at a snowed-in roadside diner is a visitor from another world.
Frustrated Erich Streator does battle with his stepdaughter Christie's talking doll Talky Tina, whose vocabulary includes such unconventional phrases as "I hate you" and "I'm going to kill you".
On an isolated family farm in Peakesville, Ohio, young Anthony Fremont, who has vast mental powers but lacks emotional development, holds his terrified family and neighbors in thrall to his every juvenile wish.
A dinner party for Bill Stockton's birthday is interrupted by a bulletin warning of an impending nuclear attack. As the neighbors scramble to prepare, they turn against the Stockton's, the only family that installed a bomb shelter.