2 out of 5

HCC-116

Reading about horrible people doing horrible things is not an unheard of focus for pulp / noir, though I’d say it’s hard to pull off and keep the reader engaged. A rarer variant of this, perhaps unique to the heretofore unpublished Brainquake, by Samuel Fuller – prior to Hard Case Crime presenting it in 2014, in their as-always lovely painted cover and trade dress – is focusing on boring people doing boring things. I say this snarkingly, of course, but I do think it’s probably a valid approach if you swirl such people and things amidst wilder surroundings; there’s a sense of that in this book, but it fades across its 270ish pages into tedium, redoubled by Fuller jumping from character to character and offing them without much consequence to the story. While this tonally fits with the creator’s filmic body of work (and you can sense how some of this would work better visually), it gets kinda stuck in book form.

The Brainquake of the title is a symptom experienced by bagman Paul, a lifelong loner who’s proven a reliable mob money carrier, keeping his affliction – debilitating headaches he eventually calls by the title, bad enough his visuals and memory are often disrupted – private, except for with a trusted associate who also happens to be his mob taskmaster. The novel opens with Paul watching, from afar, a woman in the park; we later learn this to be a rather ongoing obsession. Prior to this, though, the woman’s stroll with her baby and her husband is interrupted by the latter’s assassination, and the discovery that the baby carriage has a bomb in it, and the whole thing has this very over-the-top but offhand presentation that ends up being quite suggestive of the book on the whole.

This event leads Paul closer to the woman – Michelle – in a stalkerish way that Fuller does successfully make somewhat innocent; Paul’s interactions with Michelle in these initial meetings are some of the book’s best moments, bumping around with realistic caution, even if the initial beats drawing them together feel overwrought.

But there’s simply not much else to the book. Paul suffers his headaches; we circle around the mob’s operations; and eventually Paul finds himself at odds with his job, setting out an illogical plan to be with Michelle that seems purposefully shallow, Fuller perhaps obsessed with making sure that the majority of the book feels very uncaring – toward its characters, and the story itself, unspooling with the aforementioned shoulder shrug tone.

We don’t get much insight into anyone, and then there’s a rug pull which further undermines much hope on that front.

Brainquake isn’t unpleasant to read, and there are certainly visual splashes that excite in bursts, but the story’s telling has a mundanity that simultaneously can make it a bit of a drag, or at least make it difficult to find much reason to read about Paul’s plight.