Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

Spencer, Scott. Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1973. Print

First Sentences:

My desk is shaped like a kidney and has a slight wobble. 

I have finally learned to draw the curtains to the small window in the parallelogram of senseless noise they call my office. That's something: what we call progress.

Description:

Sometimes just the title can pull you in so you at least have to open the book and check out the first sentence. Who can resist a title like Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball by Scott Spencer? Such a book could be about anything. Any uniquely tantalizing title like this deserves to have his opening pages explored. And this book pays off in each of my "quality read" requirements of great content, character, and plot.

The novel is narrated by Paul Galambos, an experimental psychologist who teaches and researches at a small college. He considers himself "one of the most brilliant, lonely men alive," and is frustratingly going nowhere in his career and life. In an effort to escape his current position, Paul answers an advertisement from NESTER (New England Sensory Testing and Engineering Research) for a job that offers "Full Experimental and Executive Freedom / Unlimited Opportunity." 

And then the oddities begin. After being pushed down the stairs, hospitalized, drugged, and abducted to a motel room, Paul is interviewed by NESTER representatives. He is asked his professional and personal goals (power, money, fame, and maybe danger) and his willingness to give up everything to achieve them. He gladly signs a contract and is relocated to a vast compound full of researchers like himself. He is given a desk, folders of research topics, and freedom to pursue as many interesting theories as he can devise. His dreams have come true, even if his new situation seem to him a bit mysterious.

NESTER, he learns, is a data-gathering operation, studying human behavior in all aspects of life, compiling and analyzing minute responses from the brain and then developing conclusions about behavior that can be sold to companies. To be able to collect this information, ordinary people are captured off the street by NESTER's  "Force Recruiters," have electrodes surgically-implanted into their brains to record info during their future experiences, and then are released unharmed, hypnotized to forget everything about NESTER and their time there. 

Paul begins his work as a brain thief. Working under the sign, "Imagination: The Big Plus," Paul's first study comes up with data about the human gamma motor neuron that shows

changes in furniture styles cause changes in posture which cause changes in susceptibility to anxiety stimuli. In other words, it is possible to design breakfast nook chairs that will send legions of men to work each day with their teeth absolutely on edge, their knuckles white.

His work is highly praised, But Paul later is a bit surprised when he reads a notice about his death and upcoming funeral, which he of course is not allowed to attend. He has now been erased from the world, but Paul doesn't really mind. He is happy and challenged in his work. He is, however, slightly irritated that he can only leave the compound once a month along with three fellow workers and a chaperon/driver who makes sure they all return. His salary is generous, but in the compound he has no access to it. 

Fascinatingly weird stuff, huh? Plausible, yet highly off the chart. 

Soon, Paul begins to suspect everything is not quite above board at NESTER and that maybe this is not the life for him. He is worried that he, too, is being "tapped, taped, and tabulated." He starts keeping a secret journal (this book), his memoirs full of his secret work for NESTER. Naturally, he writes in bed at night under his blankets, humming and singing to mask the tiny sound of pen on paper in case he is being observed himself. Quietly he looks for an escape.

Spencer is an undiscovered author for me, one whose oddball work I will definitely read more of. This is his first novel prior to writing Endless Love, the tear-jerking novel of young love made into a movie by Franco Zeffirelli starring Brooke Shields, and most recently Man in the Woods, a creepy mystery about an unplanned, anonymous encounter between strangers that ends in an (accidental?) killing, perfect because there is nothing to tie the perpetrator to the crime... except his own conscience. I loved it.

For now, let me just say that Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball is a loop-de-loop doozy of a book that never lets you quite get your feet settled on what is going on and which off-beat character you can trust. I highly recommend it for lovers of black humor, science fiction, secret organizations, and off-beat narrators.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Spencer, Scott. Man in the Woods

Two men accidentally meet in a wooded area of a park, argue, and get into a fight in which one man is killed. The survivor feels no one saw this fight and no evidence exists that could link him to the stranger, much less his death, so he tries to go on with his life, carefully guarding his secret.