Synopsis:
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.
Review:
In her latest novel, “The Graceview Patient,” Caitlin Starling concocts an unsettling slow-drip of paranoia, exhaustion and unease, and administers it directly into the veins of unwitting readers. In “The Luminous Dead,” we follow Starling down the bowels of an alien planet, and whilst “The Graceview Patient,” is not literally a novel of restricted airways and stolen breaths, it is just as claustrophobic and cloying- the air feels just as stale, and whilst the exits happen to be doors, they are just as sealed. An immersive read that will leave you feeling as rough and out of sorts as our heavily-medicated protagonist, Margaret Culpepper, “The Graceview Patient,” is a meditation upon medicine, ethics – what is “care,”- freedom and psychological torture, something the reader themselves seems to become increasingly familiar with. An ominous, generally feel-bad clinical gothic, “The Graceview Patient,” is rich with terrible atmosphere, good writing and lots of IV drips- it’s out from St Martin’s Press October 14th.
We follow Margaret Culpepper, or Meg, who suffers from Fayette-Gehret, an auto-immune disease that has an increasingly debilitating impact on her life. She’s exhausted and uncomfortable and has all been given up on by her friends, family and job. It’s no wonder she’s enticed by the offer made to her by SWAIL. The company are offering an all-expenses paid experimental procedure in which the patient’s immune system is almost completely wiped out, leaving a completely new, completely healthy one in its place. The internal slate wiped clean. It’s a few months of discomfort, and from then on, a completely comfortable life. Of course though, when something sounds too good to be true, that’s normally because it is.
As a whole, “The Graceview Patient,” is, and I say this as an observation (a diagnosis if you will) rather than a bad thing, a lot quieter than something like “The Starving Saints.” Despite the clear differences between those two books though, the prose remains distinct- with some grotesque metaphors and horrifying imagery clearly thrown in for our discomfort. I’ve come to learn that Starling’s writing is naturally whimsical and sickening, beautiful in a way that will make you feel like you need antibiotics, and that certainly remains the case here. Alongside relatively short chapters and a compelling and fever-dreamish, if not bleak, plot, “The Graceview Patient,” is all too easy to pick up, and difficult to put down again.
There’s something scary about surrendering control, and putting your life in the hands of somebody else. For example, that could, perhaps, be relying on an individual guiding you through a completely dark cave-system on a different planet. Scary as hell. That’s the wrong book though. Here, that trust-fall lands squarely in the gloved hands of Dr. Santos and the nurses at Graceview, oh, and Adam the pharmaceutical company rep. I’d like to hope that most of us (fingers crossed, with good reason) are able to trust those in the medical profession to do their job- but things are a little different in “The Graceview Patient.” Starling explores trust- in advertising, in institutions, in medicine and procedures, in individuals and their clipboards and their good intentions. When Margaret really confronts that, alongside her illness and the drugs she’s taking, for obvious reasons, things get paranoid, strange, generally unsavoury. In a meta-twist however, Margaret becomes, not untrustworthy, but certainly unreliable, with some events fracturing and not quite matching up with how she remembers them, with apparitions and hallucinations, and some days becoming a blur or lost completely. This takes us to that central question, who can we trust? Can we trust Margaret, despite her pain and medication? Should we be trusting her caregivers, whose behaviour is increasingly bizarre? Or is the answer nobody?
“Shutter Island,” meets “One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” in Caitlin Starling’s insidious, gothic pharma-thriller. A novel that will make you think, second and third guess whilst reading, before keeping you up all night “The Graceview Patient,” either is, or absolutely isn’t, for those with trust issues, depending upon how self-flagellating you are.I don’t know. What I do know is that Starling’s command of dread and tension, alongside my finely-honed anxious and deeply pessimistic nature, made for a rather stressful and depressing reading experience indeed- I recommend.
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