Read This! Not That

Instead of The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney read The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein

Both of these novels were very commercially successful and each has had their own movie adaptations.

However The Body Snatchers boasted many more than The Puppet Masters with 4 adaptations: 1956(Kevin McCarthy), 

1978(Donald Sutherland), 

1993(Gabrielle Anwar) 

and a recent one in 2007(with Nicole Kidman). 

The Puppet Masters only boasts a semi-successful adaptation (1994) starring someone who came out in both Donald Sutherland.

With equally chilling stories of an invasion of an almost undetectable enemy whose purpose is hardly known and gives a sense of paranoia that had a different type of emotion for those living in that time. The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein(1951) and The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney(1955) were both written during the Cold War. Though the stories and theme are quite similar it is the complete sense of storytelling in which they differ and the superior book prevails. In the Body Snatchers the duplicates live only a half a decade of years and cannot reproduce. The Puppet Masters however have the aliens actually being much more symbiotic in nature and their presence is much more like that of the scare of the Communist Russian of which heavily analogy is used. The struggle presented by the character is much more of a mental one. The Puppet Master aliens also eventually become more difficult to spot and remove from the body of whom they are controlling. It also gives a sense that eventually the entire human race will become mindless slaves to these extra-terrestrial beings unlike The Body Snatchers in which the human race would just be wiped out. The Puppet Masters overall gives a better sense of the paranoia and fear the people were facing with dealing with the issues of how a regular person would react to such an invasion. The Aliens themselves are quite realistic in the sense they are more like sentient symbiotic beings than intelligent bacteria that completely duplicates a being. I would highly recommend reading The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein and overall would prefer it over the also well regarded novel by Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers.