The Darkling Brain

The Darkling Brain
By Tony Arnold
He used to punch supervillains through skyscrapers. Now he can't remember where he parked.
Once known to the world as Brain Boy — and later Brain Man — our narrator spent decades flying, fighting, and saving a planet that never quite deserved him: dinosaurs, robot armies, reality-bending nemeses, a rogues' gallery too outlandish for the comic books that made him famous. Now he's just another resident of Scientonomy Palms, a Florida retirement community where the shuffleboard is fierce, the Jell-O is suspicious, and his memory comes and goes like a bad radio signal.
Then a body turns up in the courtyard — four feet tall, gray-green, unmistakably not of this Earth — bludgeoned with a chunk of decorative brain coral swiped from the lobby curio cabinet. The sheriff's department wants nothing to do with a "cryptozoological" homicide. So it falls to a retired handyman with a knack for fixing broken things, his sharp-eyed neighbor, and a fading superhero who isn't always sure which decade he's in, to untangle a conspiracy involving alien medication, forensic chemistry, a landscaper's ex-wife, and a killer who's thinking several steps ahead of everyone else in the building.
Equal parts pulp adventure, murder mystery, and elegy for a man whose glory days are leaking out of him one synapse at a time, The Darkling Brain is gonzo Florida fiction at its most unhinged — funny, strange, and unexpectedly moving, often in the same sentence.
For fans of absurdist crime, satirical superhero deconstruction, and the golden age of only-in-Florida weirdness.

Be the first to write a comment and rate this book