“A Plague of Demons” by Keith Laumer

We’ll call this one ... “different.” -- 2 stars

I enjoyed Laumer’s “Dinosaur Beach” well enough that I decided to check out more of his work, which is how I ended up reading 1964’s “A Plague of Demons.” Unfortunately, this one wasn’t quite so pleasurable, for me.

This book was released 7 years earlier than “Dinosaur Beach,” and it shows. Meaning that I’m glad Laumer had improved by the time I discovered him. Both works share lofty ambitions, particularly in their third acts where spectacle takes center stage. But where “Dinosaur Beach” found its balance, “A Plague of Demons” overreaches, tumbling past the line of credibility that its successor so carefully toed.

Over the course of the novel, the hero, John Bravais, transforms from hard boiled detective to mechanized monster. He begins as your typical film noir gum shoe, delivering sardonic one liners about mundane observations. Even his physical weaknesses come wrapped in witty packaging. But midway through, our hero undergoes extensive bionic enhancement, rockets away from North African intrigue, and finds himself pursued across the American heartland by extraterrestrial hell hounds intent on harvesting his cerebral matter -- and these “demons” succeed in killing him!

But then consciousness returns to John in the midst of combat, his mind now housed within a colossal war machine standing seventy feet tall upon some faraway lunar landscape. He discovers he’s been thrust centuries forward into an interstellar conflict where human minds serve as the literal cognitive engines of battle.

Later, through some unexplained mechanism, John transfers his consciousness into a feline-robotic hybrid, vanquishes a tentacled adversary, and ... these wild twists and turns go on and on. And while I won’t give any specific spoilers, I’ll note that the narrative concludes rather abruptly, without clear resolution or subsequent novels to pick up the thread.

“A Plague of Demons” reaches for the stars with its psychedelic vision, even as it stumbles over its own contradictions and over ambitions. I can see the seeds of what would later bloom in “Dinosaur Beach,” but this one just didn’t do it for me.

Still, between my 4-star experience and this 2-star dud, I might remain just curious enough to check out some of Laumer’s other works. Maybe one of those can be the tie breaker.