THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

A successor to last year's The Oldest Confession (Appleton-Century) is again an extraordinary- but not altogether impossible- adventure story in which a broad display of originality and savage caricature provides some brash to brutal effects. Raymond Shaw, a strange sort, not only hard to like but impossible to like, is a member of a patrol in Korea which is taken captive by the Communists for four days, during which Shaw is brainwashed into strangling one and shooting another of its members, witnessed by all. While all of them are to some extent hypnotized into collusion with Shaw, so that they return home to help him secure a Congressional Medal of Honor, only Shaw is selected to continue as the Soviet ""human weapon"". His Captain and only friend, Ben Marco, suspects what has happened when he submits to ravaging nightmares- shared by the other returnees- and tries to pursue what is diagnosed as an ""infection of the imagination"". Shaw, under the control of an operative, is forced to kill again and again; when left alone, he tries to fight his politically ambitious mother and the McCarthyish Governor, then Senator, she has chosen as a second husband. And while Marco tries to forestall the violence he fears- Shaw continues unchecked to destroy the only girl he has loved along with those he hates....Even if this gets a little out of hand, a brass-knuckled prose helps to bear down on some of the more frightening phenomena projected in the form of an entertainment.