This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
I don’t know that I would have picked up this novel, based just on its summary, if I hadn’t already really enjoyed Caitlin Starling’s The Death of Jane Lawrence (I was intrigued by Last to Leave the Room, but didn’t love it). I’m not into full-on horror, but gothic is one of my favorite genres, and I like suspenseful stories with a touch of horror/paranormal, etc. So I snatched this one up (hee hee, the publisher’s summary alludes to Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and read it in just a couple of days.
Margaret has an autoimmune disorder that makes living a regular life and being independent pretty difficult. When she’s given an opportunity to participate in a research study being done at Graceview Memorial Hospital, she weighs her options and decides to go for it. She’s warned the stay there will be lengthy and the treatment grueling. The goal of the medication she will receive via intravenous infusion will be to destroy her immune system, and then the medical team will build it back up. Then hopefully she can be cured, or close to it.
Meg is told over and over by the medical staff that she will go through a lot of pain and even may experience hallucinations. But the longer she is isolated in the small ward of Graceview, just interacting with a few nurses and the study manager (and briefly another patient), the surer Meg is that something dangerous is hiding in the hospital.
The Graceview Patient is a medical drama, a psychological thriller, and/or a horror story. Exactly which of those three, or a mix, is a mystery. So much of the book is focused on the details of Meg’s illness and all the types of medical treatment she is undergoing as part of the study. I find medical topics fascinating, so I enjoyed reading all the details of how she was being treated: IVs, medicines, the surgical implantation of a port-a-cath to make IV treatment easier, etc. (Maybe TMI here, but I’ve had a PICC line and had a few months I had weekly IV infusions, so I was definitely empathetic to at least some of Meg’s ordeal.)
Starling does an excellent job walking the line of is-she-simply-delusional or is-there-really-something-evil-in-the-hospital, too. Is this novel actually a horror tale? Or is it strictly a psychological story? Or both, at whatever level? I won’t reveal how it ends, or what I thought, of course. If you like this kind of suspense/horror tale, I definitely recommend The Graceview Patient.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 20 uses of strong language, a dozen instances of moderate profanity, a few uses of mild language, and 6 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There is no sexual content. Violent-type content is moderate and includes a fair amount of blood and bodily fluids, cutting, etc., that aren’t for the really faint of heart. There are a lot of hallucinations (or not? Or creatures?) involving foreign organisms.
Click here to purchase your copy of The Graceview Patient on Amazon.
*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
