Animorphs

My name is Jake. I can't tell you my last name, or the name of my town, because the enemy is already in it — and if they trace this back, they take you the way they took people I love. Here is what you need to know. The Yeerks are grey slugs the length of your thumb. One crawls into a human ear, wraps around the brain, and drives the body like a stolen car while the real person stays trapped inside, awake, screaming where no one can hear. Nobody can tell who's been taken. Your teacher. Your friend. Your mother. Animorphs is the story of five ordinary kids who cut across a construction site one night, met a dying alien, and walked away carrying the only weapon that might matter: the power to become any creature they can touch. The spine is fifty-four short first-person novels, the narration handed from kid to kid book by book, credited to K. A. Applegate and — through most of the run — ghostwritten to her outline by a small crew, Michael Grant among them. Around that core orbit the Megamorphs specials, where all five voices carry one larger story, and the Chronicles companions (The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, The Ellimist Chronicles, Visser) that pass the microphone to the aliens themselves, plus the branching Alternamorphs gamebooks. The rules are strict — acquire an animal by touch, hold its shape no longer than two hours or wear it forever — but the real subject is war, and what fighting a secret one does to children who still have homework. It goes to places children's series are not supposed to go, and its ending has become notorious for refusing to comfort you. Begin at the beginning: book one, The Invasion.