Dr. Patrick Cory burns to understand the physical chemistry of the human brain, certain that if he could study a living brain outside the massive complexity of the body, science would be immensely advanced. So when a private plane crashes near his remote Arizona home, leaving its passenger, the famously ruthless tycoon W. H. Donovan, near death, Cory doesn't think twice. He secretly removes Donovan's gray matter and keeps it alive in his laboratory. But how to communicate with it?

With the grudging help of his friend, Dr. Schratt, Cory realizes that the brain generates electrical impulses that can be sensed, like telepathy. He enthusiastically pursues communication, while his wife Janice looks on with trepidation.

As the brain gains strength it reaches out to Cory, instructing him when his own mind rests. Cory finds himself in Los Angeles on an opaque mission involving secret bank accounts and Donovan's former associates. He tells himself he must persevere with this groundbreaking experiment, even as the brain gains more and more of a hold over him. But suddenly it's too late: Cory's essence is shoved aside; he watches helplessly as Donovan takes over his body.

Donovan's only prick of conscience in life was a wrong he'd once done to a man named Hinds, and now he is maniacally consumed with undoing his wrong by clearing another Hinds of a brutal murder. As he coldbloodedly pursues his goal--to the point of plotting to kill the witness in the case--Donovan realizes Janice is a threat to him since she's the only person who knows what's happened to Cory. Filled with paranoid rage, Donovan drags Janice away to silence her, even as Cory watches, trapped and horrified, from the prison inside his own brain.

The original head trip

Donovan's Brain is composed of simple, formulaic elements: the blinkered scientist; the dissolute friend who predicts dire consequences; the long-suffering and impossibly loyal wife. The disembodied brain becomes simply a monster, its ethical degradation as foul as the diseased and bloated organ itself.

There's more message here, though, than "Do not tamper in God's domain." Donovan's brain is not only removed from its skull, it's removed from societal accountability as well. By its power over Cory it can do anything it wants without consequence to itself. Clinically isolated, as soulless as the flask in which it resides, the brain parallels Cory's single-minded pursuit of scientific truths. Cory is a modern Frankenstein, and like Mary Shelley's idealistic student, Cory unwittingly creates a monster precisely because he has lost sight of the limitations of science and the complex interdependence of the universe.

While Cory might be a Frankenstein, Siodmak is no Mary Shelley. Cory is the only fully developed character. Donovan himself is merely a simulacrum of megalomania, Schratt is left to languish after a promising beginning, and Janice, though consistently treated like a doormat, steps into the path of danger apparently in hopes that it will get Cory to finally notice her. Siodmak's true vocation was scripting B films (he created The Wolf Man and The Invisible Woman, among many others) and he seldom stops for characterization.

Presented as a series of entries in Cory's casebook, the story moves briskly. Each entry engagingly mixes Cory's fascination with the turns the experiment is taking with his suppressed fear of what might lie ahead. It's a page-turner, and for those with a mind for the interplay of science and nature, it may be a thought-provoker as well.