By Troy-Jeffrey Allen
November 28, 2010 - 17:40
Created by the slightly hard to pigeonhole Blake Leibel (“Half-Life” world champ, writer of “United Free Worlds,” and director of “Spaceballs: The Animated Series”) and written by Daniel Quantz and R.J. Ryan, “Syndrome” dares to go beyond the issue of capital punishment and wonders if evil can be “fixed” through biology and deception.
Dr. Wolfe Brunswick is a failed psychologist whose own misdiagnosis of a patient resulted in the birth of a cold-blooded killer. Obsessed after such a huge professional failure, Brunswick seeks out Thomas Kane, a serial killer bound for lethal injection for the death of 40-something people (give or take). Brunswick, with the help of some Hollywood trickery, a curious financier, and dozens of unsuspecting actors, drugs Kane, drops him into a fictional town in the middle of the Nevada desert, and looks for signs of remorse and an avenue for rehabilitation.
The start of “Syndrome” left me doubtful that the writers’ wouldn’t spend the bulk of the story preaching about the horrors of the death penalty (I had to unroll my eyes at the opening line in which a protester says, “You aren’t doing good by doing evil”). Fortunately, the book quickly begins an engaging plot about the nature of evil itself and convincingly clarifies the psycho-babble with sparse analytical exchanges about neuropathology.
Rating: 6.5 /10