Donovan's Brain is a terrific science thriller by Curt Siodmak.
He was a prolific writer and Hollywood film director in the 1940's and 50's.
He collaborated with fellow filmmakers Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and his brother, director Robert Siodmak, on films in the early thirties before moving to England from Germany, and then on to Hollywood. His twentieth screenplay was for The Invisible Man Returns (1941), which lead to his breakthrough story for The Wolf Man (1941) starring Lon Chaney Jr. His original story produced countless sequels and introduced many of the werewolf legends we now believe ~ pentagrams, dying from a silver bullet, and transforming with the silver moon. Along with a dozen other books, his screenplays include the great I Walked With A Zombie, Bride of the Gorilla and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.
"A new species of creature is building here, which never before existed in this mortal world!"
Written in 1941, Donovan's Brain was a bestseller, translated in several languages and made into a film three times over the years. More than a medical thriller, it turns into a complex mystery at the halfway mark.
We are introduced to Dr. Patrick Cory's cold scientific determination in the first chapter, where he buys an ailing monkey, carefully nurses it back to health and gains its trust, only to kill it for an experiment in brain waves. So focused on his work, his wife and assistant Janice silently works around him and makes sure he fed, while he resents and rudely ignores her.
After a small plane crashes in the mountains near their home, he finds one passenger still alive and brings him to the lab. As the patient is dying, he sees his opportunity to covertly remove a human brain and continue his experiments. Fed blood serum in a glass jar, the brain of millionaire WH Donovan is kept alive while wires and probes send pulses to an electrical print out of its brain waves. Patrick manages to bypass an investigation, and continually increases the microvolts to the brain in hopes of communication.
When he manages to connect mentally with the brain through telepathy, it is the beginning of a nightmare. Overpowered by thoughts not his own, he succumbs to the increasing will of Donovan, who begins to control his body and lead him on a cryptic path of revenge. He begins to write with his left hand, walk with a limp, and smoke cigars as Donovan once did ~ as the brain becomes omnipresent. Nothing Patrick can do, including killing the brain, will stop the dead man's desire!
Filled at first with medical experiments and brain surgery surprisingly gruesome for a book written in 1941(!) Patrick's forceful obstinance soon turns into a silent cry for help as he is betrayed by a body he cannot command. He becomes involved with the Donovan family and discovers the secret that will drive Donovan (and Patrick) to blackmail, arson and murderous ends.
Tightly written in the form of Patrick's medical journal, the mystery that unfolds is engaging and hard to guess at until the final pages. A real treat to read from a director of many old monster classics I enjoyed watching. Original and suspenseful - Recommended!
1941 / Hardcover / 234 pages
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