Ray Bradbury 19 min read

Seven-year-old Mink and the neighborhood children throw themselves into the most exciting game they've ever played, a game called Invasion, while the grown-ups smile and pay no attention at all.

Ray Bradbury's 1947 story is a chilling, masterful first-contact and horror tale. Sharp, unforgettable, superbly turned. Read it for one of Bradbury's most famous shorts, a children's innocent 'game' that curdles into cosmic dread, a razor-perfect story of the gulf between adults and children and the terror that can hide in a sunlit backyard at the zero hour.

In its time

Published in 1947, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Max Elkan