Gary Brandner - The Brain Eaters

Blurb:
"Never had he seen anything like what was happening to Hank Stransky.
Red blotches formed on the skin across his face. They darkened into shiny pustules - which broke like ripe boils, discharging a gooey liquid.

Hank jumped up from the barstool and span completely around like a man in some mad dance..."

First a workman goes crazy in a public bar with a broken bottle... A taxi-driver murderously slams his cab into a crowd of pedestrians... A newly-wed bride slaughters her husband in a restaurant and plunges through a plate-glass window.

Three strange, violent deaths, three different cities, and all on the same day.

But these are only the first of thousands.

For something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

Maximum boils, pus and mindless violence in the Brain Eaters, which reads like Gary Brander's answer to James Herbert's The Fog. Up to p. 100 and, bar the obligatory few paragraphs of plot development, there's been no let up whatever.

The Biotron Laboratory, Appleton, Milwaukee. Helicopter pilots Stuart 'Stu' Anderson and Lloyd Bratz are testing a top secret pesticide over farmland in the vicinity of the Old Shawano County Road. When it fails to turn the cows purple they realise somethings wrong and abort the mission. How could they know that Biotron employee Eddie Gault has entered into a sex-for-cannister-tampering arrangement with big bosomed eco-warrior Roanne? Instead of the harmless chemical, they've sprayed the area with a colorless vapour, marked for disposal on account of its devastating effect on the human brain (see blurb). On reporting back at the plant, both men are frog-marched off to quarantine.

Corey Macklin is an ambitious journalist on the Milwaukee Herald who happened to be present in Vic's Old Milwaukee Tavern when nice family guy Hank's face erupted in boils prior to his attacking all comers with a broken bottle. Corey links this violent episode to similar recent incidents - the Bride who stabbed her husband with a steak-knife before taking a header out the window: the mild-mannered cabbie who deliberately ran into a group pedestrians, etc. In each case the perpetrators had complained of man-flu and an unbearable headache. Just as it seems Macklin's landed the story of his career, the Herald's owner leans on him to kill it.

Dr. Dena Faulkner, bio-chemist, has been involved in a no-strings-attached relationship with Stu Anderson and is miffed that he should transfer without at least telling her over a goodbye boff. Her worst fears are confirmed when Stu's co-pilot, Bratz, on the run from the Biotron infirmary, pays her a midnight visit to inform her of her lover's death - he literally tore himself to pieces. Biotron goons arrive and take Bratz away. Dr. Kitzmiller, Dena's slightly sinister German superior, extracts her promise that she'll keep what she knows to herself. But when the bulk of the Biotron go sick with the man-flu/ splitting skull virus, she seeks out Macklin ....

To be continued ....

nah, you're still the Hamlyn man, saucy. it's just whenever i'm lucky enough to land one, i can't rest until i've read it.

Still only halfway (it's a 278 pager). i was worried that Brandner couldn't possibly write anything deserving of that genius title, but he's making a decent fist of it so far. i've only managed Death Walkers and Carrion before now (OK while you're reading them if not particularly memorable) but this is way livelier. Just when you think it's going to drag, he hits you with a second helping of ghastly vignettes. Vic's Tavern sees its second tragedy in a week: a loving husband and wife sit down to watch their favourite TV show, Dallas, and inexplicably tear each other to pieces: topping these, miserable airline passenger Norman Hastings, goes gaga on a flight from New York, attacks one of those new fangled male stewards and tears the emergency exit door off its hinges.

Looks like Brandner is gearing up to blame it all on the Russians ....

Whatta great cover....whatta great title

BRAIN EATERS

I remember this one from school...I was given £2 by a relative for my birthday....and brought this from WH Smiths... much to my grandparent's dismay! They confiscated it...and told me this sort of stuff will rot my brain....

how right they were!

Have just edited it into the post at top of this thread.