PSYCHAMOK

Hardcover of the final volume of the Psychomech Trilogy, formerly a 1995 paperback. Lumley’s most recent book in the States: Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (2002).

In all three installments, British Army Corporal Richard Garrison, blinded by a terrorist bomb, uses expanded brainpower to fight psychic villains. In Psychomech (1984), this power comes from the infernal machine named Psychomech, a mechanical psychiatrist begun by a German SS psychiatrist to help the Nazis build supermen. It does seem to vanquish death and indeed allows Garrison to revive a cryogenically preserved dead lover. Volume two, Psychosphere, locks Garrison into a paranormal place where he’s a multimind. His powers leak into the Psychosphere, empowering it, until he electrotransitions himself violently into the Psychosphere and begins to purge and purify the planet of its evils. Now, in Psychomok, there have been 20 years of peace on Earth when Psychomech goes mad and a million people, including Garrison’s son, Richard Stone, fall under the irreversible plague of insanity called The Gibbering—with only Richard, who has inherited his father’s mental powers, able to fight the horror and battle the bubble-brained mind-machine. When Richard’s mother, the woman brought back from the dead, is bisected in an auto accident, her remains shrivel, mummifying into her earlier death. The dead villain of Psychosphere, Charon Gubwa, a mental giant of ESP, returns as a telepathic fungi, invades J. C. Craig, an earlier co-builder of Psychomech, and orders him to build a new machine. Then Richard escapes and resumes his love affair with Craig’s daughter Lynn, although—to stay rational or even make love—he must force out a stream of obscenity to keep The Gibbering at bay. Chased by Craig’s hirelings, the lovers go on the run. Richard finds he can materialize food and teleport himself by thought. The final battle? Rather earthly.

The Gibbering was too good an idea to spend on fantasy.