Nehtdx

Years ago, I read a novel whose title I'd like to rediscover. What I can remember is this:

• The novel's world has powerful, amoral-or-evil telepaths who are in a dominant social position. They've got large, unusually-shaped heads. They might be aliens?




• It must have been published before 1996. I'm certain of this. But it could've been published at any point before that. I feel like it might've been from the 1980s given the cover's style, but that's more of a guess.




• It was most likely a British edition, but I can't rule out an American (or otherwise) edition that was imported.




• It started with an action sequence in an apartment building, I think, and the protagonist had to escape being framed for a crime he didn't commit. He's down on his luck and an everyman.




• The protagonist eventually finds a weakness in the telepaths by subjecting them to some horrible noise, which causes them extreme pain and possibly reduces them to normalcy. This is the only way they seem to be vulnerable, and it's how the non-telepaths take control of society back from them.




• I don't think it was particularly space-y but I am not certain.




• It had a serious, if pulpy, tone. Fast-paced action/drama.




• The cover was all flat yellow, and had a smallish illustration (less than a quarter of the cover) showing one of the telepaths kneeling down and crying out on it. He was wearing something appropriately futuristic. I'm pretty sure this was the cover's over-all look, and that there wasn't any other art except for that.




• Its title was something obscure, but striking and allusive.

Some Googling tossed up The Demolished Man as a candidate, but I couldn't find a cover that even vaguely matched how I remembered it, and the plot's not a perfect match (though it does have an awful lot of similarities). Alternatively, I could be mis-remembering that book, but whence the cover? ISFDB doesn't have any that are even close, and I don't know any better places to look for what might've been an obscure British reprint.

Could it be Dick's "Our Friends from Frolix 8"? It was about telepaths ruling the normals, and the cover sort of fits, but I don't remember the details of the plot that well.