It's Animorphing Time: My 54 Month Animorphs Journey Begins

I'll be in my 40s once this is all over.

Peak design

Back in the late 90s, my mother would take me to the library several times a week. Our local library was a place I adored and cherished. It was quiet, smelled of musty books, and had all the things to look at. I would take myself up to the 2nd floor and read fantasy and science fiction books that were above my reading level but I tried anyway. This is where I developed my love for Star Wars novels and also fantasy novels like Dragonlance which is based on Dungeons and Dragons. 

I did frequent the youth room in the building even if the offering of titles were not as exciting to my 10-12 year old chatty brain. But one series pulled me in instantaneously and it was Animorphs. By this time, and I’m thinking we are in 1998 or 1999, Animorphs had at least a dozen entries to the series. I started with 1996’s The Invasion and was captivated by the immediate world building and imagining of the alien races who interrupted the lives of several regular children walking home one night. Also they got the ability to turn into dope-ass animals? SOLD. 

As always, my mother was enthusiastic that I was enthusiastic and I would try to read several books a week. I loved Animorphs. 

But then? I got caught up on what was published and began to get tired of waiting for the new entries. I became distracted with other things, 9/11 happened, I got an Xbox and then I discovered Stephen King. 

I still feel (at 35) a sense of loss for not knowing what happened to Jake and the rest of the kids who were imbued with the alien gift to turn into creatures. I could look it up or watch a lengthy YouTube video explaining the various arcs and what became of the heroes but…

Where is the fun in that? 

There are 54 mainline Animorph books written (like half of them) by Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant under the moniker K.A Applegate. The rest were written by ghostwriters under the K.A. Applegate name and one of them includes Melinda Metz who would go on to write the Roswell High series. That series would later be turned into Roswell and this means more for people my age but it was a SEMINAL television show. Of course the reasoning for the ghostwriters was due to the demand of output from Scholastic. The series was making more money than they knew what to do with. 

The last book was published in May of 2001 with an ending that is apparently controversial amongst fans. I have not looked into it and won’t until this is all over. 

Until what's over? Until I read all 54 books over 54 months that is. 

This is a side quest I have wanted to complete and why not now? Focusing on one book a month and throwing my thoughts together is a fun idea. What’s funny, though, is that I’ll be done with this project when I am in my 40s. What will the world look like then post book 54 of Animorphs? We don’t know. Hopefully there will still be a world! We might be in the Water Wars stage though. 

Among all my other projects with this Substack, I will be tackling Animorphs in a monthly…column? Is that the right word for this? 

It seems that Animorphs still resonates with people around my age. The books tackled adult themes like violence, death, and intergalactic politics. It was a wonderful stepping stone for learning about world building - a unique and simplistic concept that MORPHS into a bigger narrative complete with alien names I still cannot pronounce.

File under “HORSESHIT COVERS.JPEG”

I hope to collect all the original books, too, with their original covers. No matter the condition, as long as I have them I’ll take it over the abominations that are the new covers. Scholastic tried to bring back the old covers but it wasn’t met with the sales numbers they were looking for. I’m not sure if Animorphs can still be a viable series for kids these days. I mean, sure, of course but young reader books are different now. The market is different now. But there was a time when you could take Harry Potter and the latest Animorphs book out of the library and that is special. I mean, I guess you could still do that but you know what I mean. 90s, baby! 

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for the first post about The Invasion. 

Thank you all!