Books: The Little Strangers

THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (247 pp.)—John Wyndham—Ballantine ($3.50).

As a rule science fiction is neither; most writers of real talent believe that their place is in the home, not in outer space. An exception is John Wyndham. a British novelist who manages to be in both places at the same time and to apply a sort of documentary style to the description of a world of sinister flapdoodle.

Novelist Wyndham well knows the first rule in writing a chiller—effective specters must be ectoplasmatter-of-fact—and so he takes the dullest, most ordinary village in England to populate with...