This is essentially 28 Days Later by way of the first third of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with heavy Cold War Era political thriller undertones. Basically, a hippy eco-terrorist chick gets her boyfriend to screw up a harmless test involving spraying dye to test air dispersal, and the brain eater parasite is unleashed. The book, for the most part, follows a disgraced newspaper reporter as he discovers and unwinds the crisis. It was a fast-paced and easy read though the last fifty pages had a couple of lulls that probably should have been shortened. Otherwise, all the character work and introductions had something to do with driving the plot along including cutaways to the several first incidents of brain eaters causing people to go berserk.
The story had plenty of horror and some tense action pieces though I preferred the straight horror scenes more. The subplot that finally intersected in the last bit of the book with the KGB Agents and the Soviet “Agricultural” Specialist, which was the espionage undertone of the work, surprised me in its final twist involving the hippie girl which I thought that I had figured out already. It was a little punch to my political stances as she was made out to be a vicious idiot who was violently against war and pro-environmentalism that the reader was supposed to hate. At the same time, some of the victims of the parasites had racist and homophobic thoughts as they were succumbing and portrayed as victims. I might be reading too much into it as I have no idea what the author’s political bent was at all.
Overall, I recommend this if you’re looking for a not-too-heavy end-of-the-world horror story. The story is fast-paced, it never stops moving forward save in a few spots, and there is no doubt that it is meant to be a straight horror story judging by the very horror-morality ending, the other elements from outside genres being just a part of the scope. In fact, I definitely now want to check out the first [book:The Howling|481462] book now. I loved the movie since childhood so it’s not like I wasn’t interested beforehand. ( )

The Brain Eaters is one the many follow-ups after The Howling Trilogy by Gary Brandner. I read The Howling in sixth grade and it proved to be well beyond the appropriate level of a twelve-year-old. A friend made a post the other day that made me think of my youthful reading indiscretions and seeing how I read The Howling series a few times I decided to see what else Brandner had written.

The Brain Eaters sounded as good as any of his other titles, and boy did it take me back. Although published in 1985 it seems more in tune with the late 1970s. There is Vic's Old Milwaukee Tavern that used to serve Schlitz, Carlton cigarettes, Gypsy moths, baseball series played against Cleveland, an evil corporation, and, of course, the Soviets. The hero is a newspaper reporter fighting his way back from a terrible fall.

The story is typical of something I would have grabbed off the paperback display at Lawson's, a Cleveland area corner store chain. The plot is fairly predictable, there is an unexplained horror that is slowly realized as it spreads. The government refuses to recognize the problem and the Soviets are lurking in the background. The book is part horror story (with surprisingly non-graphic sex scenes), part newspaper man tracking the big story, and part something to kill time.

The writing is ok. The plot is ok. The memories it brought back were great. If you were around in the late 70s and fell into that cheap horror or cheap spy genre, you'll probably like this book for the trip back in time. A fun read.




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