An unnamed narrator is lying in bed, old and infirm, recalling his earlier days as a Freudian (very Freudian, it turns out) psychoanalyst, when he was treating a patient named Isadore, who had the bizarre inability to conceive of anything that existed before the time of her birth. Religion, classical languages, history and literature were all equally foreign to her, and yet she had a nearly photographic memory concerning popular culture and current events. From there, the book just gets weirder and weirder.
THE BRAIN WITHIN ITS GROOVE is sort of difficult to categorize. Drifting between horror, literary fiction and black comedy, it could be perhaps best described as a very effective style-parody of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft: “In the first occurrences, it was something as insignificant as small red dot of blood produced by the infirmness of the hand holding the razor, but in the later dreams, it evolved into bizarre disproportions in the sizes of the elements of my face, until the image displayed the most ghastly monstrosity, impossible in its geometrical composition as the paintings of mad artists, yet fully recognizable as my own figure – nay, more recognizable as myself than any true reflection of myself I ever saw during my waking hours.” This hyper-wordy, Neo-Victorian voice continues throughout, and in general, the Poe/Lovecraft impression is spot-on and sort of hilarious. In terms of horror, it’s best described as the psychological subcategory, being perhaps best described as “disturbing,” or even “freaky,” more than scary outright.
If there is a flaw in THE BRAIN WITHIN ITS GROOVE, it’s its failure to deliver on more of that promised weirdness toward the ending. It’s pretty vague about the whole situation, claiming there’s no need “to dwell on the sordid details.” But some clarification, even of bits and pieces, might have really made the horror that much more horrific: as John Hodgman would say, “Specificity is the soul of narrative.” Still, one can’t fault the book for relying on the reader to use their imagination, even if it is perhaps a little too much reliance.
As a horror book, THE BRAIN WITHIN ITS GROOVE is not necessarily the greatest – its influences/sources of parody, Poe and Lovecraft, likely could have come up with something scarier – but it’s nonetheless an unconventional and sometimes fascinating examination of youth and age, time, the classical confronting the modern, human sexuality and the human mind, and more importantly, it’s a book that has the rare distinction of being even weirder than advertised.
Reviewed by Charles Baker for IndieReader.com