STARTLING TOMES

BELLEVUE . Robin Cook. Putnam's; 2024. Mitt Fuller starts his surgical residency at the famous -- or infamous -- Bellevue Hospital in New York. He is especially intrigued by the place because several of his ancestors were doctors there, some of whom were quite celebrated. Bellevue is now a full-service hospital center, practically a city into itself, but each day Mitt passes the abandoned original psychiatric institution that has stood there empty for years but, oddly. never been turned into anything else. During the first few days of his residency, he sees strange things -- forceps that seem to jump out of someone's hands -- and is astonished that his patients, who seem fine at first, start dying, even though it's very much against the odds. Then he sees the bizarre apparition of a little girl with a strange instrument poking out of her eye ... Is Mitt going crazy, or is Bellevue haunted by the dead patients of the past, and could it be true that his medical ancestors were...

THE INVISIBLE MAN . H. G. Wells. First published in 1897. Although written over a hundred years ago,   The Invisible Man   is written in a very accessible style and fast pace. The inn he stumbles into at the opening is not the Lion's Head as in the film, but the Coach and Horses. There is some humor in the book, but certainly not as much as in   Whale's film version. There is no love interest to speak of, and the protagonist, Frank Griffin, winds up in the home of Professor Kemp, whom he knows, by accident. In the film Griffin is driven crazy by an ingredient in the invisibility formula, but in the novel he's pretty much a self-absorbed sociopath from the beginning. He doesn't derail any trains -- although he does plan to embark upon a "reign of terror" -- but he does murder one man and attack many others. This is certainly not   Wells's   best novel, but it is fascinating, highly influential, and a good read to boot.

THIS ISLAND EARTH . Raymond F. Jones. 1952. Fiction House Press. This novel which became the basis of the science fiction   film of the same title   was expanded from a story originally published in   Thrilling Wonder Stories  ("The Alien Machine"/1947) and its two sequels. The first half of the novel is quite similar to the film, in which a scientist, Cal Meachum, receives instructions to build an "interociter," which leads him to a secret conclave of people who seem to have some unknown mission. Although the protagonists in the book do eventually wind up on an alien planet, most of the second half of the movie is invented by the screenwriter. There's no decimated husk of a planet or mutated hulking monsters in Jones' novel. Instead Meachum learns that earthlings are simply being used to build interociters to help the aliens in a struggle against a dark intergalactic force which has now set its sights on Earth; Meachum and his lady love convince the aliens ...

IRON MAN: FEMME FATALES . Robert Greenberger. Del Rey; 2009. In this paperback novel brought out in the wake of the   Iron Man   movie with Robert Downey, Tony Stark -- the inventive genius who is also the super-hero Iron Man -- has his hands full with attacks by both the forces of Hydra ["cut off one limb and a dozen take its place"] and the mafia-like European Maggia. Both groups are being led by sexy woman who coincidentally have scarred faces: Madame Hydra [formerly the Viper] and Madame Masque [formerly Whitney Frost, the daughter of Count Nefaria, who heads the Maggia]. Masque comes to work for Stark in disguise, and Madame Hydra intrigues him and beds him in the guise of a mysterious green-haired woman named Katalin [that should have been his first clue]. This is a moderately entertaining book using concepts and characters created way back in the "silver age" of comics in the sixties. The hoped-for meeting/battle between the two different if similar women nev...