Review: Well-Written, Suspenseful Tale
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 21, 2012
This is a well-written, psychological suspenseful tale involving deliberate manipulations by well-meaning psychiatric physicists funded by The Trust, an organization hoping to profit by the results of the mind-shattering machinations originally devised by the criminally-insane father of a young resident.  Young children in the state's care are used as subjects in experiments authorized by an ominipotent agency that may or may not be sanctioned by the government.  With the facility's director and social worker devoted Christians, the Windmere institution has been motivated to accept substantial operating funds to allow a noted psychiatrist work with the children in a research project that "heals" the children by allowing them to die under the influence of magnetic resonance, a process the psychiatrist refers to as SST.  Formerly an asylum for the mentally ill, the Windmere building now houses only young people that have become a burden to the state, unwanted or forgotten by their original families. Freeman, the son of the pioneer scientist who originated the theories behind SST, has been a subject of such tests all his life, including when, at the age of 6, his mother was killed and his father jailed as the insane murderer, resulting in Freeman being made a ward of the state. Freeman carefully avoids social interactions, and he works to identify options that would allow him to survive the treatments and the specters of former patients of the mental asylum that are raised from the dead as an unintended consequence of the psychiatrist's experiments.  The story holds the readers attention and offers mind-challenging ideas that, upon reflection, are less than possible--but hold enough truth to allow the story to be based on an abstract scientific base.  There are some aspects of the realities that are not explained in this novel, and the conclusion leaves unresolved concerns and much room for speculation, a situation ripe for a potential sequel.