The Graceview Patient
A Novel
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
Misery meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers in this genre-bending, claustrophobic hospital gothic from the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.
Margaret’s rare autoimmune condition has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated and in pain. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial.
The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital.
Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A hospital patient grows increasingly suspicious that the motives of her caretakers are far from benevolent in this suspenseful tale of medical horror from Starling (The Starving Saints). Twenty-six-year-old Meg Culpepper, who has a debilitating autoimmune disorder called Fayette-Gehret syndrome, agrees to a pharmaceutical company's offer of an all-expenses-paid experimental treatment dubbed SWAIL that promises to "rebuild" her "confused immune system." Isolated in a special ward at the hospital, Meg acquiesces to a protocol of restrictions and medicinal infusions that puzzle her but raise no alarms—until she discovers that the death of a fellow patient in the same treatment program has been kept from her by hospital personnel. Meg's frustration at her bewildering circumstances quickly curdles into the paranoid suspicion that she is being held prisoner by sinister forces with malevolent intentions. Starling expertly immerses the reader in Meg's anxiety, showing how even the most routine experiences during a hospital stay become cause for concern to her unsettled mind. The novel's horrors are all the more palpable for tapping into the squeamishness that many feel toward medical care. Readers are sure to be frightened.
