Fragments

Taking his cue from Theodore Sturgeon's classic 1953 novel, More Than Human, David (Footprints of Thunder) updates the venerable SF theme of a single consciousness built from multiple minds and delivers a successful, purely visceral horror thriller. The eponymous fragments are the minds of five autistic savants, each of whom possesses a sliver of genius. Research psychologist Wes Martin hopes to fuse them into a superconsciousness with the attributes of a god, but he produces something more akin to a devil. ""Frankie,"" the entity synthesized from the computer-enhanced savant intellects, is tainted with the homicidal rage of a rape victim who died in the house where the experiment is conducted. She finds in Gil Master, a psychotic psychic who has infiltrated Martin's team, the perfect channel for resuming the murderous rampage that terrorized her small Oregon town over 40 years before. After a lethargic opening, the novel kicks into high gear when the scientists race to destroy Frankie before she eliminates the savants and most of the town. Remarkable coincidences and far-fetched feats of deductive reasoning abound, but they pale in the flash of a climax worthy of comparison to that of Carrie. Its thought-provoking subject notwithstanding, David's tale is an action-packed no-brainer full of guilty pleasures for even the most cerebral reader. Simultaneous mass market publication of Footprints of Thunder. (July)