Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Doc Savage and his aides get a shocking reception in Michigan when their plane is seized and crushed by a giant hand rising out of a lake. Doc and his men are pursued by crazed giants until Doc frightens them off with a grenade. Investigating Bruno Hen’s cabin, Doc comes under fire from the assassin from New York; in a chase, the killer is lost in a patch of quicksand. His wallet contains a note directing them to a deserted mill. There, Doc finds Griswold Rock, who claims to have been lured there by a phony message from Doc. The next day, Doc and his men are lured into a trap by the enemy gang; during the distraction, Griswold Rock is captured by the monsters. On the way to rescue him, Doc explains what he’d learned about Pere Teston, Rock’s employee: Teston was a chemist who devised a formula to accelerate growth in farm animals. The formula, it seems, also works on humans, turning ex-convicts into monsters in a mad extortion scheme. Doc’s autogyro is attacked by an enemy plane and it crashes into a lake where Doc and his men, with Jean Morris (who had been hired to keep the monsters under control) are captured and imprisoned on the villains’ camouflaged island (which had been discovered by Bruno Hen, necessitating his murder). At night, Doc leaves the prison to investigate Teston’s lab. Returning to the pit, the next morning Doc shouts in a loud voice what he had learned: there is no antidote for the growth formula. Chaos breaks out above and Doc and his men escape. During the battle, a tank of chlorine gas is breached, releasing its deadly contents. Doc and his party rescue the innocent Teston and escape to safety, returning later to find the dead bodies of the monsters, the criminals, and their leader—Griswold Rock.