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Invasion of the Body Snatchers landed in the bi-weekly fiction magazine Collier's, which published Jack Finney's story as a three-part serial over consecutive issues beginning in November 1954. Finney had already seen thirty of his short stories run in Good Housekeeping or Collier's, but the response to what was at that time titled The Body Snatchers was huge. At no point since has the "pod person" not been a part of our vernacular, with four feature films and countless spoofs and homages to remind each generation.

Finney's source material bears passing resemblance to the classic B-movie directed by Don Siegel and distributed by the Allied Artists Picture Corporation in 1956. In a small Northern Californian town, twenty-eight year old general practitioner Dr. Miles Bennell is reunited with a close friend, Becky Driscoll, who's returned to town following her divorce. Though mutually attracted to each other, Becky's visit to Miles is not purely social. She's come to ask him to see her cousin Wilma Lentz, who's suffering a delusion that her Uncle Ira is an imposter who only looks like her uncle.

Says Wilma, "Miles, he looks, sounds, acts, and remembers exactly like Ira. On the outside. But inside he's different. His responses"--she stopped, hunting for the word--"aren't emotionally right, if I can explain that. He remembers the past, in detail, and he'll smile and say, 'You were sure a cute youngster, Willy. Bright one, too,' just the way Uncle Ira did. But there's something missing, and the same thing is true of Aunt Aleda, lately."

Miles refers Wilma to his colleague, psychiatrist Manfred Kaufman. Mannie confides that nine patients have come to him with fears of loved ones who are imposters; his opinion is that none of these patients are suffering from neuroses but dealing with something external and real. Miles' friend Jack Belicec, a writer, pulls Miles out of a movie theater during a date with Becky to bring him to his house, where his wife Theodora keeps watch on something Jack discovered under the basement stairs.

The strange corpse, which the Belicecs have laid out on a billiard table, shows no wounds or signs of death. It has no scar tissue and Miles notes the face looks ... vague. He also determines the corpse has no fingerprints. Connecting the corpse with the imposter stories spreading through town, Miles suggests that Theodora keep watch on the body while her husband sleeps, waking him if she notices any changes in the corpse. Miles returns home, falls asleep and is wakened by Jack & Theodora, who fled their home in terror with the answer Miles was afraid of.

Realizing that Becky might be in danger, Miles dashes to her home, where she lives with her father. Breaking into their basement and poking around with a pen light, he sees nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Then Miles opens a pair of cupboards.

There it lay, on that unpainted pine shelf, flat on its back, eyes wide open, arms motionless at its sides; and I got down on my knees beside it. I think it must actually be possible to lose your mind in an instant, and that perhaps I came very close to it. And now I knew why Theodora Belicec lay on a bed in my house in a state of drugged shock, and I closed my eyes tight, fighting to hold on to control myself. Then I opened them again and looked, holding my mind, by sheer force, in a state of cold and artificial calm.

Miles runs upstairs, grabs Becky and before she even wakes up, has carried her halfway to his house. Miles phones Mannie, but when he returns to the Belicec's basement with Jack, the corpse has disappeared. The psychiatrist launches into a measured thesis of what the men might be experiencing: mass delusion, latching onto the story circulating through town about "imposters" and seeing exactly what their imaginations expected to see in those basements. Later, Miles realizes that mass delusion doesn't account for the blank fingerprints, or the fact that the Mannie he knows never used to make his mind up so quickly.

Miles and his friends determine that the seed pods popping up in basements first appeared near a farm outside of town, visitors from outer space, of course. Confronted by one of the imposters, they learn that the pods are a desperate form of parasite, traveling across the universe on light energy. They seek new worlds to thrive in, absorbing the atomic particles of their hosts and their memories while they're most vulnerable, during sleep, reducing the hosts to dust with a perfect imitation, perfect except for emotion or free will.

Finney retooled his three-part magazine serial twice, first as a novel published in 1955 (as The Body Snatchers) and again in 1978, to take advantage of a major motion picture being released by United Artists. The version I read was the '78. Finney made changes here, altering the title to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to exploit the popularity of the movies, setting the story in 1976 and updating references he felt were antiquated. He changed the name of the town from "Santa Mira" to Mill Valley, where Finney lived. The author also drops a reference to his 1970 novel Time and Again, though only fans will spot it.

I have to rate Invasion of the Body Snatchers on two scales, the legacy of the material and the material itself. As legacy, this is five stars. Finney always maintained he wanted to write a good read and nothing more, but like a magic mirror, his story has the power to morph into a commentary on whatever cultural or social conformity is in the air. In the '50s, it was the threat of Communism, or Red hysteria running rampant the United States. In the '70s, there was urban malaise and Me Decade pop psychiatry to be wary of. Today, political correctness or technology might indicate pod activity.

As a story, this is three stars at best. Even Finney's retooled 1978 version is exactly what it always was: a magazine serial published in 1954. Becky Driscoll is little more than a doll and frequently appraised by the well-intentioned and gentlemanly Miles by her physical attributes only. She's an accessory to the protagonist and almost seems like a pod person herself. There is a mildly eerie vibe throughout, but Finney lets off the gas too often when it comes to suspense. The plot lists, and much about the biology of the seed pods and their dispersal doesn't make a lot of sense.

Without giving much away, Finney's source material lacks the doomsday pulse of the 1956 and 1978 film versions. As such, the writing feels far more disposable. I'm enamored by Finney's wild imagination and how his tale has spread like ivy over the last sixty years, but would mostly recommend the novel to the author's fans. The 1978 film version directed by Philip Kaufman that relocated the action to San Francisco with Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and Leonard Nimoy is the definite version of this material: offbeat, intensely creepy and monumentally tragic.