Help! Wait! Stop. Stop and listen to me!...These people who're coming after me are not human. Look, you fools. You're in danger. Can't you see? They're after you. They're after all of us. Our wives, our children, everyone. They're here already. YOU'RE NEXT!

What is the connection
with the classic British science fiction novel, The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (1951), and what is the connection with the sci-fi classic movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

Messer has borrowed the name Triffid for the human counterfeits in his book. That is the only connection with Wyndham's story.

Messer has taken some inspiration from the 1956 Don Siegel movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was derived from a serial by Jack Finney in Collier's magazine.

In Siegel's noir masterpiece, the protagonist, returning to his hometown, finds a disturbing pattern of behaviour. People complain that family members are suddenly fundamentally different. As though their bodies have been taken over by imposters. They appear to have a secret and evil plan, and they want everybody to join them. And many already have. Neighbours, the police, the government...

We have seen in modern times how a whole population can be mobilized in the service of evil. We have seen this many times. And so it is with our road behaviour. During the nineties Canadians surrendered their brains to an alien force. They surrendered their title to humanity.

Jack Finney was interested in the ability of technology, modernization and fragmentation to disenfranchise people and make them lose their ability to act human. Humans had ceased being the masters of their own inventions. Indeed, they had lost the ability to master anything at all.