Category: Horror Publisher: Brown Paper Publishing
Type: Fiction
Pages: 310
Copyright: 2011
ISBN-13: 9780615470047
Something sinister beats at the heart of Sanitarium, something seeping through the walls. If the inmates weren't crazy before they were committed, they are now.
Removed from the general public, high in the outskirts of the city of Corners, Oregon, Sanitarium houses the criminally insane. Something sinister beats at the heart of Sanitarium. Something
seeping through the walls. If the inmates weren't crazy before they were committed, they are now.
Sanitarium explores the depths of human emotion, the intensity of insanity, and blurs the lines between real and imagined threats. The characters are haunted by themselves as much as the spirits around them.
Excerpt
HEART OF RATS
Nurse Claire grinned as the stone walls around her screamed. The Sanitarium hulked on a hill in a dense forest, alone for miles, and with good reason. Housed within were inmates, all dubbed criminally insane by the judicial system. Dr. Michaels, a man she greatly admired for his vast achievements in the field of psychology, made it his life’s mission to help these people, to give them the second chance society never could. But Nurse Claire couldn’t feel the same compassion as him. Maybe when she’d first started working there, but not now. Now, they made her sick. Over the years, her hero, Dr. Michaels, hadn’t been able to help even one patient. Without telling him of her new opinion, Nurse Claire decided these patients couldn’t be helped.
But it didn’t matter. She had a job. That was all that mattered. The cart she pushed carried a bowl of oatmeal, a small tub with water and a sponge, and a rag. It also carried hypodermic needles filled with a sedative. Just in case. She’d learned her first week on the grounds to carry her sedatives at all times. The wheels on the cart screeched, keeping harmony with the one who screamed from the isolation room. Somehow sound carried in this place. It no longer unnerved her. But that man in isolation sure could scream, and it made it sound like the entire building screamed.
Professional Reviews
Sanitarium
The novel is fantastic—everything I’d in my mind it would be and quite a bit more. . . . As the work lays, it is quite daunting and impressive. The same sense of immersion, the same blunt of confidence in both concept, form, and narrative flourish that I was initially attracted to in your work is spread out, made into the veins of this thing—and I don’t mean this in only superficial, virtuosic
construction (such as Watchers when you sent it so many moons ago, you know, the stylistic creativities that are all quite cool) but in the brooding atmosphere—that’s what drives the thing. It, without being any one outright, has this blend of so many elements-- in the moment character
study, removed almost classic ghost story, graceful unspooling of narrative into narrative—really
striking out from any label, any leaning on genre or expectation. It’s new, which is something I like—I would have settled for just ‘good shit’ but New is better. Nothing strikes a false note, or worse, a lame note, which is impressive considering the span of it—the reach itself is admirable, that it actually manages to get finger holds, hoist itself remain aloft.
The fortunate inherit riches, prestige, positive notoriety. Those not so lucky bear legacies filled with poverty, infamy or, worse yet, the unhinged insanity and murderous urges of their ancestors.
Chris has been fostered at the Crowley boot camp since he turned seven. At sixteen, he is finally ready to run away because his foster father is an abusive person who works Chris and the other children to the point of exhaustion. All he has left of h
