[What] is a successful, much-admired dramatist doing here, in a wild-eyed, exclamation-pointed science fiction?…

"Altered States" is Mr. Chayefsky's first novel. It reads, however, more like a screen treatment that someone rashly advised him to "novelize"—a process that may itself be biologically impossible. Instead of camera close-ups of mild-mannered endocrinologists registering horror at the brink of the Dread Unknown, instead of stunning cinematography and eerie sound effects to accompany a man's regression into prehuman form (and then reconstituting him, like freeze-dried coffee), the book rains heavy Star-Treknology at us; a steady downpour of exotic, often incomprehensible scientific jargon….

It could almost be parody; one clings forlornly to the wish that it were—especially during the dialogue. ("Mason, we're into multidimensional time spaces! I mean, this is post-Einstein relativity!")

Yet under all the electron-spin resonance tests, the metabolites, the fractionating, the images of pyroclastic debris, lapilli, Phlegethon, the...