[3] After mysterious and deadly viruses wipe out much of the world's population, an entire ecosystem of strange and violent alien creatures, dubbed the Chtorr, start to appear.

Narrator and protagonist Jim McCarthy and his friend/colleague/occasional sex partner Ted Jackson are a young half-trained researchers attached to a squad of soldiers tasked with clearing the Colorado wilderness of nests of large and predatory "worms," one of the relatively better-known species of Chtorrans.

After a further unsettling encounter with a family of nesting worms, he and Ted and their samples are sent to Denver, now the US capitol, where Jim learns that political squabbling is getting in the way of making any real progress on countering the invasion.

He ends up being recruited by a mysterious covert group led by "Uncle Ira" who dedicate themselves to clearing out both the Chtorr and human political opposition to this goal at any cost.

On a mission over Chtorran territory in northern California, McCarthy and his sometimes-lover Colonel Elizabeth 'Lizard' Tirelli crash Liz's army helicopter in a blizzard of strange pink fuzz.

Upon return to San Francisco, McCarthy spends some time studying a phenomenon that surfaced soon after the invasion; massive groups of people seem to lose all but the most basic animal intelligence and wander aimlessly in herds, unwittingly luring in others who get too close.

Seeing a similarity between the herd-members and the bunnyman, McCarthy allows himself to join the herd in order to study them, and only barely manages to be rescued and restored to his former self.

She leads McCarthy to testify in a meeting with the unnamed President of the United States regarding the need to drop a nuclear bomb on the heavy Chtorran infestations in the Rockies, arguing that the people who live there are no longer human.

Moving to Hawaii, the new US Capitol, Jim undergoes Mode Training to learn to overcome and direct basic human psychology; following this, he and Lizard resume their anti-Chtorran duties.

This leads to a diplomatic and military upheaval, which in turn gets Jim booted as the science advisor from an upcoming expedition to Brazil, and replaced with Dwan Grodin, a woman with Down syndrome who has been intellectually enhanced with numerous brain implants.

The expedition gets left to die in another pink Chtorran blizzard by a vengeful General and his aide, but is rescued by an unknown benefactor, probably due to the important new information uncovered.

After getting chewed out in person by Uncle Ira, McCarthy is still sent on the mission to the Amazon rainforest, which is home to some of the heaviest Chtorran infestations on the planet; to deal with the political problems, Jim resigns his commission and is re-hired as an "Indian Scout."

To rescue her, he uses Dwan, who McCarthy correctly surmises is an unwitting victim of the Telepathy Corps, and utilizes their communications network to mount a search for Tirelli.

In June 2015, the fifth book (called A Method for Madness at that time) was reportedly slated for release September 2015[1][4] but according to the author, at the end of August 2015 only the first draft was finished and given to beta readers.

[3] Set in a devastated early 21st century United States with logical expected advances in current technology such as a fledgling Moon base, this series of science-fiction novels describe the invasion of Earth by an alien ecology.

The unnamed President of the United States had refused to accept that a nuclear World War III was inevitable, so he had decided to travel to Moscow, where in the year 2000 “the Millennium Treaties” had been signed.

The books give attention to such things as high-energy microwave weapons, cyberwarfare, military teleoperation, and intelligent agents that can be militarized.

As the survivors struggle to rebuild civilization, they gradually discover that hundreds of alien plant and animal species have mysteriously begun to entrench themselves.

The books largely follow the adventures of Jim McCarthy, a scientist and soldier in the U.S. Army, who attempts to understand the Chtorran ecology even as he engages in combat to destroy it.

In addition to descriptions of alien ecology, the Chtorr series includes lengthy expositions on various aspects of human psychology, particularly under wartime and survival conditions.

Chtorran molecular biology is thus compatible with Earth's, with right-handed DNA and left-handed proteins - if it wasn't, the infestation would have starved to death as soon as it began, unable to digest Terran organisms.

Europe has been only moderately infested, for reasons not entirely clear (possibly because the initial plagues devastated its highly concentrated population centers so badly that Chtorrans there did not have a surplus of humans to eat).

Some of the absolute worst and largest Chtorran infestations are in the western United States, India, and the Amazon basin of Brazil — areas which increasingly resemble an alien planet.

In Gerrold's 1977 novel Moonstar Odyssey, there is a reference to "Chtorr-plants" "...named for the legendary place of child-eating demons from which they were supposed to have come" and having an alternate form of photosynthesis.

Reference to the Chtorr or Chtorr-like species and situations also pop-up in Gerrold's 1993 book Under the Eye of God and its 1994 sequel A Covenant of Justice.

In his Star Trek novel, The Galactic Whirlpool, Gerrold quotes the "Terran philosopher, Solomon Short" as saying, "This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.

Gerrold had not thought to repeat the effort, but as work on Method for Madness progressed, he received so many fan inquiries about "buying a character" that he decided to do it again.

Prior to that, In A Rage For Revenge, Gerrold included several characters, particularly children who were fated to be eaten by worms, named after friends he had made when attending his first UK Star Trek conventions.