The Patient

Description

LOCAL AUTHOR

As debut works go, this one is fairly good, though not perfect. It’s a fairly quick read that really only bogs down in a couple of places. This falls under two categories: the found narrative and the unreliable narrator tropes. This was supposedly written as several posts on a now defunct message board in the mid-2000s. The Board was archived and was later discovered by other people, who have been unable to track down information about the real names and what really happened. It follows a young doctor, fresh out of school, who is wanting to change the world. He gets a job at a state asylum and is told not to go near a certain patient who has driven several people to death and others insane. When the doctor does, he starts to question the asylum’s policies and whether the man himself might be sane.

The scene with the patient is decent, though honestly it is better told through the notes, the audio recordings, and other ways. The final few chapters are fairly good, though one is a bit of a letdown; overall, however, it is a good first shot.