ADVERTISEMENT

The Patient

We rated this book:

$23.00


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.


Reviewed By:

Author Jasper DeWitt
Star Count 4/5
Format Hard
Page Count 224 pages
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publish Date 2020-07-07
ISBN 9780358181767
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue July 2020
Category Horror
Share

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “The Patient”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *