Donovan's Brain by Curt Siodmak

"A new species of creature is building here, which never before existed in this mortal world!"

Written in 1941, Donovan's Brain was a science fiction bestseller, translated into several languages and made into a film three times. More than a medical thriller, it turns into a complex mystery at the halfway mark.

With scientific determination, Dr. Patrick Cory buys an ailing monkey, carefully nurses it back to health, only to kill it for an experiment in brain waves. So focused on his work, his wife and assistant Janice silently works around him, 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 seizes the opportunity to covertly remove a human brain and continue his experiments. Fed blood serum in a glass jar, the brain of millionaire W.H.

Donovan is kept alive while wires and probes send pulses to an electrical printout of his brain waves. Patrick manages to bypass an investigation and continually increases the microvolts to the brain in hopes of communication.

When he mentally connects 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. Nothing Patrick can do, including killing the brain, will stop the dead man's desire!

Filled with medical experiments and brain surgery surprisingly gruesome for a book written in 1941, Patrick's forceful obstinance 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.

Siodmak was a prolific writer and Hollywood film director, collaborating with Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and his brother, director Robert Siodmak. His screenplay for The Invisible Man Returns (1941) led to his breakthrough with 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.

Tightly written in the form of Patrick's medical journal, the mystery that unfolds is engaging and hard to guess until the final pages. A real treat to read from a director of many old monster classics I enjoyed. Original and suspenseful—Recommended!

1941 / Hardcover / 234 pages

My other review for Curt Siodmak:

Hauser's Memory