1978: two children live with their grandmother who is the head of an famous cutting edge asylum, when a young, traumatized girl is brought to live with them and their world starts to unravel. 2019: One of the children has grown up, now calls herself Lizzy, and is a podcaster who searches for cryptids, when …
Continue reading The Children On The Hill by Jennifer McMahon
"A detective story with no detective" says the tagline on this book, and it's a pretty good description. Set in Edinburgh in 2011, Margaret is a middle aged woman whose life has imploded in London, so she flees to her mothers in Scotland. It's one of the coldest Winters on record, and there are a …
The word Bedlam became part of common usage as a slang word for chaos, anarchy and mess, but was originally a well known hospital for those suffering from mental illness. It was established in 1247 and existed at different sites til the 1930's. It's history is the history of the treatment for people who were …
Continue reading Bedlam: London And Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
It seems like there is a glut of books now where two parallel narratives in two times link up to solve the mysteries of the other, one being in the past and the other being in the present. It feels like it's own genre, perhaps. One of the finest examples of this is Sebastian Barry's …
McMurphy is a free spirit and gambler who manages to get transferred to a mental asylum to escape the work unit in prison. But he finds that he's bitten off more than he can chew when he takes on Nurse Ratched. Written in the 60's and set in Oregon, the book says so much about …
Continue reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
In this story of psychological horror, a young doctor takes a position at an out of the way hospital for the mentally ill, where a new form of therapy is being undertaken on six damaged women, who are kept under permanent sedation in the Sleep Room. As the doctor notices the women's sleep cycles synchronising, strange …
CravenWild 