THE DARKLING BRAIN A Whisanant Mythos Novel 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.
