College professor Jeff Munro becomes involved, quite by accident, with a group known as Heralds for Peace (HFP). They’re a mysterious group regarded with suspicion by many. They appear to be a cult but whether they’re a religious or a political cult is uncertain. Jeff Munro violently disapproves of them.
Munro encounters an angry mob about to kill a woman. She is a member of HFP and the mob is convinced that HFP is some kind of sinister threat to society.
Then he encounters a strange very frightened man (Munro thinks of him as the Running Man) who is convinced that the HFP are out to kill him. And It appears that they really are out to kill him.
Munro is puzzled. He has seen evidence of irrational hatred directed at HFP but also evidence that they might indeed be a sinister organisation. He is intrigued enough to start poking about the cult’s vast headquarters compound hidden away deep in the woods. He sees a couple of things that lead him to wonder if this really is an ordinary cult or whether there might be strange and powerful forces at work, forces that might be unnatural or other-worldly in origin. He expects cult members to be fanatics, but these cultists are disturbingly zombie-like.
Infiltrating the HFP seems like a good idea at the time but Munro may have landed himself in the middle of something more dangerous than he can handle.
And also more perplexing. There may be bad guys behind the cult, or possibly several different groups involved behind the scenes. All of them may be planning to double-cross each other. There may be multiple levels of double-crosses. The nature of the bad guys is a mystery - there does seem to be something unnatural going on.
Munro needs to find somebody he can trust but he might be better off not trusting anybody.
In 1963 brainwashing was becoming a cultural obsession. Not just brainwashing of prisoners-of-war but more subtle forms of brainwashing employed by the advertising industry and governments - there were plenty of different kinds of brainwashing about which to be paranoid and this novel certainly taps into that cultural obsession.
Munro is an interesting hero. He’s a college professor so he’s not exactly open-minded. He led a campaign to deprive the HFP of the right to speak on campus. He has a bit of an authoritarian steak although at the time the author may have seen that as a good thing. It certainly makes Munro a valuable potential recruit for the HFP - this is a man who has a yearning for power.
There’s plenty of paranoia here. Poor Munro seems to be hopelessly out of his depth. He starts to understand some of what is going on, but not all of it, and that could lead him into making mistakes. And he’s just an ordinary college professor, not a secret agent.
There is some genuine science fiction content although it takes a while to emerge. The science fiction elements are moderately interesting.
It’s a fairly entertaining tale if you enjoy science fiction paranoia and you don’t set your expectations too high. Worth a look.
Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot in a two-novel paperback edition.
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