Thursday, January 26, 2023

✱✱Book Review✱✱ The Patient by Jasper DeWitt

 

The Silent Patient by way of Stephen King: Parker, a young, overconfident psychiatrist new to his job at a mental asylum miscalculates catastrophically when he undertakes curing a mysterious and profoundly dangerous patient.

In a series of online posts, Parker H., a young psychiatrist, chronicles the harrowing account of his time working at a dreary mental hospital in New England. Through this internet message board, Parker hopes to communicate with the world his effort to cure one bewildering patient.

We learn, as Parker did on his first day at the hospital, of the facility’s most difficult, profoundly dangerous case—a forty-year-old man who was originally admitted to the hospital at age six. This patient has no known diagnosis. His symptoms seem to evolve over time. Every person who has attempted to treat him has been driven to madness or suicide.

Desperate and fearful, the hospital’s directors keep him strictly confined and allow minimal contact with staff for their own safety, convinced that releasing him would unleash catastrophe upon the outside world. Parker, brilliant and overconfident, takes it upon himself to discover what ails this patient and finally cure him. But from his first encounter with the mysterious patient, things spiral out of control and, facing a possibility beyond his wildest imaginings, Parker is forced to question everything he thought he knew.

Fans of Sarah Pinborough’s 
Behind Her Eyes and Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World will be riveted by Jasper DeWitt’s astonishing debut.

Momma Says: 4 stars⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Patient is one spine-tingling story. There's a tension about it that rises little by little, and the whole thing is unsettling in the way that some of the classic thrillers are. I really like the way this story is told, and even as I was speeding through the pages (yes, it's that intense), I was fascinated with the change in Parker as it comes through his online posts. That's an intriguing way to tell the story, and I think it's totally effective for this book. The ending is kind of ambiguous, which is something that would normally bother me, but like the way the story is told, it works well. I think I would've been disappointed with a set-in-stone ending after the journey we take with Parker. All of this is done in a little over 200 pages, so it's a quick read - quick, yes, but it doesn't fall short on anything, in my opinion. Rather than give away the book's secrets, I'll stop there and sum it up by saying The Patient is one of the most chilling thrillers I've read in quite some time. 



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