review of
Isidore Haiblum's The Return
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 24, 2017

When I picked up this bk at my favorite local bkstore, the incomparable Caliban, I thought that I was getting a work by someone whose writing I'd probably read as a teenager & then, basically, abandoned. Then I looked up his bibliography online & none of his titles seemed familiar. Since many of my bks that I'd had as a teenager were destroyed by my barbarian family I didn't have those to consult. Instead, I found Haiblum's The Identity Plunderers on my personal library shelves. I haven't read that one in the past decade or there wd be my review of it on Goodreads & I don't recall it at all even though almost all the SF on shelves is what I've already read. Nonetheless, the spine of the bk doesn't show signs of the bk having been held open. It's unlikely that you, the reader of this review, have any interest in any of that but I'm just trying to give you an idea that Haiblum's somehow mysterious to me. Chapter One begins:

"Cramer kicked the nurse in the stomach.

"She doubled over, bumped against the wall, tried to scream, and couldn't. She weighed two hundred and sixty-nine pounds, was bald-headed, and looked like an ex-wrestler. Slowly, she straightened to a half-crouch, glared at him, flexed her fingers meaningfully, a thin layer of sweat coating her broad, glistening skull. The nurse was going to kill Cramer.

"Considering the fact that he was strapped into a strait-jacket, that possibility, he had to admit, was all too real." - p 7

Coincidentally, that reminds me of something that Stewart Home might write in one of his neoist-exploitation novels. In that case the "Cramer" wd be Florian Cramer. But I digress. What this reminds me of even more is the 1st short story I wrote when I was 13, it was about the protagonist escaping from a mental institution using laundry chutes. I even submitted it to Analog magazine even though it didn't qualify at all. It was rejected. I destroyed my juvenilia long ago so I don't have it anymore. Too bad. Don't destroy yr juvenilia folks, you might want it one day to prove to yrself that you were more precocious than you realized at the time.

"He knew he was going mad. He rocked back and forth, his head in his hands, but that didn't make it any better. Probably nothing was going to make it any better.

"On the 3-D, Colonel Gains was streaking back to earth; ten days had gone by, and now his ship had burst through the clouds, a tiny, golden shimmering speck in the sky—right on schedule.

"Cramer had been on the other side of the rec hall when he had felt it; it had whipped him around like a magnet; the magazine he had been leafing through had fallen from his hands to the floor; he was being drawn, irresistibly, against all reason, toward the 3D, like some fish snared by an invisible hook and line" - p 35

Beep, beep.

&, yes, much of the bk describes him escaping from a high-security mental institution. But what else is happening to him? That's the central mystery of the bk. Since we're on the subject of mental institutions, it might be worth mentioning that I was once pd to be on what was called the "Board of Normals" at a mental hospital where "Normals", such as myself, were subjected to the same tests as the patients in an attempt to try to understand why the "Normals" were functional & why the patients weren't. The "Normals" were quite an eccentric lot. I remember taking a taxi to the hospital & having to go to great lengths to convince the driver that, no, I wasn't going to the patient admissions entrance but to a staff entrance instead.

"The floor under his feet faded out. In its place—a whirlpool; he was being sucked under. He worked his lips to tell someone about this, but no sounds came out. The elongated lights were winking on and off steadily now, pulsing like a heartbeat. The sounds that came to his ears were no longer familiar; they seemed to be coming from vast distances—the howling and rushing of some great wind, like no wind he had ever heard before.

"Through all this, only the space ship was real, stark against the blue of the sky, the gray of the clouds, a gleaming needle, homing earthward, taking on weight and substance as it grew larger, came closer. . . .

"It was something inside the ship." - p 36

Beep, beep.

"Numb fingers traveled in the direction of indistinct knobs, fumbled clumsily with them; presently there was a sharp click—the set flicked out; the halo of light wizened to a dot, hung in midair for an instant, like a suspended firefly, and was gone.

"The walls, floors, and figures of the rec hall began to reshape. The sounds—mixed voices, footfalls on polished floors, the pop of Ping-Pong balls—were merely human again. Kenmore was dropping back into place around him like a large puzzle." - p 37

One of the things that I liked about the institution where I was employed as a "Normal" was that they were trying to be drug-free. I whole-heartedly endorsed that. On the flipside, tho, there were fluorescent lights & TVs that were on all the time. It was my opinion that the flickering from these 2 light-sources was unhealthy. Maybe Cramer was just watching too much TV, eh?!

"Cramer thought: He doesn't know he's doing it—he's broadcasting . . . unawares. Like static off an electric eel, or the twitter off a cricket, it's not a conscious effort" - p 38

""Dr. Linsford means that we are notified, automatically, of all cases that might conceivably be related to the neuron-disruption syndrome. Such symptoms as you mentioned would fall into that category."

"Neuron disruption, Cramer knew, meant Starky." - p 41

& "Starky" means 'stark raving mad', a madness in a homicidal form. While things might nor be looking good for our hero Cramer he still manages to escape & to be found by allies who enable him to take on a new identity w/ the help of some futuristic plastic surgery:

"Gelg laughed. "this is the real things," he said. "We use chemo plastics. But once the skin mold is fixed—that's it. Only the proper chemo combination can restore the original features."

""What kind of MD are you?" Cramer asked.

""MD? What MD? I'm a dentist. Don't worry, young man, I won't pull any teeth. The facial change is computer manipulated. See? Untouched by human hands, so to speak. I merely press the buttons!"" - p 88

Cramer uses his new ID to try to trace down the peculiar source of his troubles. Penetrating a potential enemy's lab he bluffs his way thru:

"Cramer sighed, "What are those beep, beep things."

"Dr. Tellfax said, "What are what?"

""Beep, beep," Cramer said.

"Dr. Klausner said, "Beep, beep?"

""Precisely. Or something like that."

""Well, now," Dr. Klausner said. "This is most peculiar." He removed his glasses and began polishing them. "Amazing, in fact."

"Dr. Tellfax said, "I am at a loss—a loss to know how you people work."" - p 104

Beep, beep. You've heard of "Westerns" but what about?:

"They ate. Later they set up the 3-D. The last half of an Eastern was followed by the news-view." - p 114

Now THAT's beep, beep funny. But WHY exactly?:

"The signals plucked at him like fingers.

"He raced toward the twenties, still speeding west.

"He knew what he'd have to do: There could be no talk, no hesitation, no wasted motion.

"It was shoot—and shoot quick." - p 160

Humanity's one solution. I was born in 1953. I grew up saturated w/ M.A.D., Mutually Assured Destruction. Most, if not all, SF writers warned against this M.A.D.ness. Haiblum's no exception:

""They watched, my dear Cramer, and saw this globe's first steps into space. They continued to watch. The wars, the bloodshed, the incredible destructions that the peoples of this world unleashed against each other, did not go unnoticed. No indeed. This was not the kind of neighbor the mind people—for so we shall call them—wanted. This was not a force they wished to unleash on the universe. Are you following along, Captain?"" - p 167

The Return appears to've been Haiblum's 2nd novel. As such, it's, perhaps, a bit amateurish. I was left w/ a feeling that a later bk might be a sequel but it's unclear to me whether that was the case. I didn't really find this that interesting. What's more interesting to me is this: "His many articles dealing with Yiddish" (from the "About the Author" section in The Identity Plunderers). ( )