The Hollow Man

Jeremy Bremen has a secret. All his life he has been cursed with the unwanted ability to read minds. He can hear the secret thoughts behind the placid expressions of strangers, colleagues, and friends. Their dreams, their fears, their most secret desires are as intimate to him as his own. For years his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the intrusive thoughts of those around him. Her presence has protected him from the outside world and allowed him to continue his work as one of the world's leading mathematicians. But now Gail is dying, her mind slipping slowly away, and Jeremy comes face-to-face with the horror of his own omniscience. Vulnerable and alone, he is suddenly exposed to a chaotic flood of others' thoughts, threatening to fill him with the world's pain and longing, to sweep away his very sanity. His mathematical studies have taken him to the threshold of knowledge and enabled him to map uncharted regions of the mind, to recognize the mind itself as a mirror of the universe...and to see in that mirror the fleeting reflection of the creator himself. But his studies taught him nothing at all about the death of the mind, about the loss of love and trust, and about the terrible loneliness of mortality. Now Jeremy is on the run - from his mind, from his past, from himself - hoping to find peace in isolation. Instead he witnesses an act of brutality that sends him on a treacherous odyssey across America, from a fantasy theme park to the mean streets of an uncaring city, from the lair of a killer to the gaudy casinos of Las Vegas, and at last to a sterile hospital room in St. Louis in search of the voice that is calling him to the secret of existence itself.