The Invaders

The Invaders, by Keith Laumer

August, 1967  Pyramid Books

The Invaders was before my time, but I became aware of it at some point. I don’t recall the series ever being run in syndication, but it came out on DVD some years ago, and also the digital antenna channel MeTV was playing it at one point. So far the only episodes I’ve seen were the two directed by Sutton Roley (“the Orson Welles of television”), and while I enjoyed them, I mostly just watched them due to Roley. 

Running for two seasons, The Invaders starred Roy Thinnes (star of one of my favorite ultramod “future ‘60s” sci-fi movies, 1969’s Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun) as a man who had stumbled upon the fact that aliens were here on Earth, posing as humans and up to nefarious ends. It was sort of a Fugitive schtick with Thinnes’s character, David Vincent, constantly on the run and going from place to place to stop the aliens. This novelization, by veteran sci-fi author Keith Laumer, serves as the origin story that never was. In fact, the novel is all original, which surprised me; you’d figure David Vincent’s first encounter with the aliens would’ve been the subject of the pilot episode. But apparently it wasn’t. 

TV tie-ins were known for sometimes combining several episodes into one novel, a la the Six Million Dollar Man tie-in International Incidents, which I have but haven’t yet read. Laumer follows the same vibe here, with the caveat that none of these stories were actually produced as episodes. So while the first section of The Invaders details how David Vincent becomes aware of the alien threat, the ensuing plotlines have him operating in more of the “lone wolf in a new town” capacity of the series. It’s all very episodic, but Laumer does tie things together with a recurring villain. So I guess people who enjoy the show would want to seek this tie-in out, as it delivers the origin story that the show itself apparently never did. However Laumer does detour from the show in some regards; the aliens do not have the extra finger that their TV counterparts did, and also they don’t turn into smoke when killed. However their faces have a masklike sort of appearance. In many ways the aliens here reminded me of the ones that appeared years later in another TV series, War Of The Worlds. 

When we meet him David Vincent is just a roving engineer who goes around the country providing consultation services for various companies. We don’t get too much detail about him, just that he’s tall and rangy, and that girls often smile at him. It doesn’t hurt that he drives a Jaguar XKE. But the passing mentions of young women smiling at David Vincent…these seem to be Laumer’s attempt to put at least some women in the novel, because folks there aren’t any others. In all three “books” of The Invaders, David (as Laumer refers to him) only deals with other men; there are only a few female characters in the novel, usually secretaries, or in one bit a college co-ed. In each case we’re to understand these women respond to the raw animal magnetism of our stud hero, but none of their burning yearning is ever requited. David spends such an unintentionally humorous amount of time telling himself he doesn’t “have time” for these women that one could easily come to a whole different sort of conclusion. 

Well anyway, we meet David while he’s consulting at a factory, where he happens to notice a strange object, one recently created by the factory for a client. David, we’ll eventually learn, has come across several of these strange objects on his nation-wide trips to various factories. They are made of a strange plastic he has never mentioned before and, when he inquires of the various factories, he learns that the objects are always ordered by a mysterious company in California. His interest runs him afoul of Dorn, the bulky security chief of the factory. When Dorn pulls the mysterious object out of David’s grasp, David marvels over how Dorn’s arm is “hard as oak” and also hot to the touch. Not that David Vincent is a pushover; in later backstory-via-dialog we’ll learn he kicked some shit over in the ‘Nam, though he doesn’t like to talk much about it. 

But then David isn’t much for talking, and comes off as cipher-like, particularly once he sets upon his one-man mission. He has a friend at least: Lieberman, an old college pal who works as a scientist. David, fueled by his curiosity, sneaks into the factory, grabs the pieces of mysterious plastic, and takes them to Lieberman. The scientist gradually figures out that the parts fit together into what appears to be a disintigrator ray gun – what we’ll learn is called an “Eruptor.” David and Lieberman decide that only the authorities can help, thus call the local FBI office. Laumer develops nice tension here with the agents being rather terse and, like Dorn, having faces that seem like rubber masks. David instantly distrusts them. 

One thing I can certainly say about this tie-in as compared to the actual show is that the tie-in is much more violent. David makes several kills here, and they’re all pretty bloody. He learns that Dorn and several other similar men are indeed aliens, their human forms elaborate disguises, and this leads to a violent battle. David kills a few of the aliens in the fight, dropping a crate on one of them (and ripping him in half) and impaling another with the tines of a forklift. He also gets in some shots with the Eruptor, but in true Maguffin fashion it grows so hot when fired that it can’t be held any longer, so David drops it, no longer able to rely on it. 

A vague detail Laumer doesn’t elaborate on is that David works for “the General,” a character who is ultimately unseen. After this big battle David rushes back to home base, hoping to get the General’s feedback…only to learn the General is dead. Here the novel gets very clunky, as we flash forward three months and David’s become a proto-Bruce Banner, traveling alone around the country, totally off the grid. A one-man army in the war against the invaders. Why? It’s never properly explained why he must stay underground, why he can’t go for help – in fact, the FBI agents were willing to help him in the earlier sequence. But that’s the setup of the show, of course, and Laumer’s constrained by it. He does what any contract writer would do and just barrells on, hoping we’ll overlook the illogic. I didn’t, because I take notes. 

David in his travels has come to a small town, where he happens to see flyers for ISIS, a “UFO cult” that has spread due to the numerous UFO sightings of the day. David goes to that night’s meeting, where he meets Henry Thrall, a man who claims to be like David – just here to gawk at the crazies. There’s some interesting insight here on how UFO sightings of the era were seen; David feels that it couldn’t all be a hoax, or a conspiracy…but personally I think Gian Quasar is on to something. David feels that these “saucerites” might be a sort of front for the invaders, and though he plays his cards close to his chest he suspects he might’ve encountered a kindred soul with Thrall. In fact, Thrall claims that he’s aware of the truth behind it all – and asks David to leave the meeting and come back to his house. (Again, the “hmmm” connotations are pretty strong here.) 

But this “book” is titled “The Maniac,” so we know something bad’s about to happen. And, sure enough, Thrall’s “house” turns out to be an abandoned wreckage in which he keeps all kinds of weird stuff…including an “autopsied alien” which is clearly just some poor guy the psycho captured and accused of being an alien. Again, all of it a lot more twisted than anything that could get on TV in 1967. This leads to a crazed game of cat and mouse between Thrall and David, the former chasing our hero through the darkened ruins of the house. The sequence builds in intensity, complete with the surprise return of our recurring villain. Here Laumer (or whoever wrote the unproduced script he was possibly adapting – perhaps series creator Larry Cohen, who is credited in the book) opens the story with Dorn offering David a chance at immortality – if David were to help the aliens, in return they would give him superstrength and other superhuman attributes, like being able to run forty miles an hour. 

All these things the aliens of the “Great Race,” as Dorn refers to his people, are capable of doing. They also have weird regrowth powers; Dorn’s hand was burned off by the Eruptor, and he displays a new babylike appendage that is growing on the stalk of his arm. Soon he will have regrown a completely new hand to replace the lost one. I don’t believe any of this stuff made it into the actual TV show; I don’t recall the aliens having any of these powers, but then again I’ve only seen two episodes. There is very much a hive mentality to the aliens in this novelization; Dorn also refers to the “Survival Master” as being the leader of the invaders; but then, Dorn later states that the aliens aren’t here to invade so much as they just want to cohabitate with the humans. They’ve spent millennia searching for a suitable planet, and have finally found it with Earth. I’m not sure if any of this backstory made it into the show. 

The final “book” is titled “Counterattack,” and has David hooking up with another one-off character, a sergeant near an Air Force base who relays his own story of having encountered aliens. It’s once again “three months later,” meaning The Invaders takes place over the course of six months. David Vincent is still traveling around on his own; Dorn mentioned that “something” would be happening within three months, and David is determined to figure out what it could be. A chance reading about an upcoming “meteor shower” in the paper is all the clue David needs; soon enough he’s meeting with various scientists to get more info on what the scientists claim will just be a harmless meteor shower in the desert. David suspects – and of course will be proven correct – that the shower will be camouflage for an alien invasion. 

Again we get more action than a TV show could handle, with David and his new military pal blasting away in the desert with heavy weaponry as the “meteors” turn out to be clusters of alien pods which are floating down onto the desert floor. We also get a final dealing with Dorn, who as mentioned is the novel’s main villain; another difference, as I don’t believe the TV show had any recurring villainous aliens. Like most ‘60s shows it was no doubt episodic, as is Laumer’s tie-in, but he does a good job of tying the three separate “books” of the novel into one story. By novel’s end David Vincent is once again on the road, one man alone against the Invaders, and you still don’t understand why he can’t go to anyone for help. 

Laumer is very much in a “pulp” mode for The Invaders, going for fast action and description. There are accordingly a lot of clunky sentences and typos, but then the latter could be the result of poor copyediting by the publisher. (Ie “Forty wall bulb” instead of “Forty watt bulb,” etc.) Laumer wrote another volume…and also there was an Invaders series published in the UK, some of the volumes of which were brought over to the US under different titles. It all seems rather confusing and I haven’t much researched it, mostly because I was fine with just reading this one book.