The Mind Thing

Fredric Brown was a terrific mystery and science fiction writer. His short stories (some are so short that they hardly constitute a paragraph) and his novels are full of humor and delicious twists. I read somewhere the he intentionally limited the vocabulary of his fiction to 1,000 common English words, which he used to a masterful effect.

The Mind Thing, published in 1962, is a creepy science fiction story about an alien that lands on earth and begins taking over the minds of human beings, much like the creatures in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But I like Brown's take on this familiar genre better than Body Snatchers, because it is funnier, scarier, and more believable. If you've never read Brown before, I'm envious. You're in for a treat. Link