Review: For a truly dark tale, seek "Asylum"
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 31, 2012
"Asylum" has always struck me as a funny word. If we are in a cruel, horrible country, we may be granted asylum in a less-horrible country. However, "an asylum" always brings to mind Nurse Ratched, too-bright fluorescent lights, and over-medicated patients shuffling around, mumbling to themselves.Lakehurst Psychiatric Hospital is definitely among the latter. It is ruled by the authoritarian Nurse Kirsten Winter, who was hired there right out of college. No patient has ever walked out of Lakehurst "cured." They are heavily medicated, and if they misbehave, they are taken to the basement for "special treatment," involving some sort of experimental, horrifying, electronic brain interface device.One day, Lakehurst receives its most-famous resident. Her name is Annie Radford. Annie is a teenaged girl living in rural Colorado with her parents, until one day, she takes her seven-year-old brother out in the woods and shoots him right through the forehead. Why? Simple: because God told her to.A few things about Lakehurst: patients and staff members seem to die frequently; ghosts of varying levels of scariness appear to patients and staff alike, and there are some strange experiments going on in the basement.Amy Cross's "Asylum: The Complete Series" contains all eight of the original books--most of them, 59 page novellas--in one 449pg volume. I can't imagine reading them separately, to be honest. Once I got started, I wanted to discover all of Lakehurst's mysteries, and uncover the truth about the evil that lurks there.I love the way "Asylum" is structured, too. It starts out with Annie's arrival at Lakehurst, and follows her acclimatization there. We meet the various characters as she does: the kindly-if-addled Dr Campbell, Eddie the sadistic guard, icily evil Nurse Winter, and kindly, sorta gay Nurse Catherine Perry. (Nurse Perry kisses and feels up Annie, but doesn't molest her or anything, once Annie says she doesn't want to play that way)We move back in time, seeing how Kirsten Winter was limping through nursing school, trying to rebuild her reputation after what seems to have been an alcohol- and sex-fueled period of notoriety (specifics are never given). One of her professors told Kirsten that Lakehurst would be the only place that would take her, but that she'd be a perfect fit; she is. We see her parents, now divorced; her father has remarried the perfect woman, and her mom lives in terrible squalor, alone and dying.At different points in the narrative we go back to the time when Annie's brother was missing for three days. After he was found unharmed, the family moved to a ridiculously isolated forest home, literally miles from anyone. Almost. Two days before Annie kills her brother, she meets a young man in the woods. His name is Kieran, and he's doing graduate-level research on abnormal AM radio frequencies. She agrees to meet him at 9pm. They spend the night in his tent, and Annie's all kinds of grounded when she gets home. We then learn what she saw and heard that led her to take her brother's life.So many things happen across so many years, that "Asylum" could be a horrible coleslaw of plot elements. Author Amy Cross avoids this nicely, though. If anything, many of these jumps really justify--or at least explain--the characters' later behavior. Everyone's path to Lakehurst was troubled, dogged by dark forces. Lakehurst is the epicenter of evil here, where things that can't be true, are, and things that can't happen, do. The question remains, is Lakehurst evil because of the people working there, especially the evil Übermensch living hidden in the attic? Or are they evil because Lakehurst is cursed? (I like the homophone in the hospital name: i.e., Lakehurst lay cursed.)"Asylum" is not a book you'll likely breeze through in one sitting. It has intricate plot and character machinations, and there are times where we aren't really sure whether certain things really happen. This isn't unreliable storytelling. Quite the contrary, the characters THEMSELVES can't be sure whether some things they see or hear are real: things that we and the characters witness occasionally turn out not to have happened. There is definitely a sinister force around Lakehurst, and it facilitates some perceptual oddities. Add in some already sinister people who come to work there, and the evil meter needle pegs. Lakehurst Psychiatric Hospital is a miserable place to live and to work.However, for a few night's fireside reading on a cold night, it's one hell of a place to visit.Highly Recommended.