Literary Las Vegas: Charles F. Lee

Charles F. Lee has a master’s degree in mass communications and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War. After the war, he worked with the Atomic Energy Commission and came to Las Vegas to work on the Nevada Test Site. Lee uses his scientific background to feed his fiction in the novel “The Threat From Within.” The story follows a team of telekinetic teens out to stop a European research institute that plans to secretly destroy the minds of America’s youth through seemingly safe cellphones.

Excerpt:

The Institute for Brain Study was staffed with dissident scientists, renegade professors, and other disgruntled intellectuals from all over Europe and Asia. These people spent years studying the brains of adolescents in an effort to prove to the rest of the world the often and unexplained reasons why this human age group did what they often did, much to the exasperation of adults, particularly their parents. These scientists, medical people, and other professionals spent years gathering information from books and published scientific articles dealing with the anatomy of the human brain and, in particular, the brain of adolescents. They were eagerly seeking and proving the weakest link in the chain of the developing human brain. It turned out to be a teenager’s brain.

When the members of the advance team were given their marching orders, each man was handed a mysterious black box and told that under no circumstances should this device be taken or given up by them. This mysterious device had been tested and retested by the Institute for Brain Study staff and proven to be the means to reduce the adolescent brain to that of a child. A well-planned and executed strike on the adolescent segment of American society could and should eliminate America as a world superpower.