Synopsis:
What would guilt make you do?
Hadleigh Keene died on the road leading away from Hollyhock Asylum. The reasons are unknown. Her sister Morgan blames herself. A year later with the case still unsolved, Morgan creates a false identity, that of a troubled housewife named Charlotte Turner, and goes inside.
Morgan quickly discovers that Hollyhock is… not right. She is shaken by the hospital’s peculiar routines and is soon beset by strange episodes. All the while, the persona of Charlotte takes on a life of its own, becoming stronger with each passing day. As her identity begins unraveling, Morgan finds herself tracing Hadleigh’s footsteps and peering into the places they lead.
Review:
A big thankyou to NetGalley and Angry Robot for my Arc of this book!
Fewer buildings hold the levels of mystique and terror than that of the abandoned psychiatric hospital. It is no secret that the methods involved in mental health treatment have drastically changed for the better over the years, and it is also no secret that the majority of treatments administered to past patients are utterly unfathomable today. Old treatment methods are dark relics of the past, held within the asylum, and thus old asylums exist today as a conduit for the unimaginable… until they are on the page. The innate horror of ‘The Redemption of Morgan Bright’ is multifaceted. Through dredging up and breathing terrible life into the horrors of the past, Chris Panatier masterfully draws attention to very real horrors in our present.
Chris Panatier’s novel follows Morgan Bright, a woman who infiltrates the asylum in which her sister Hadleigh was at first committed, and then fell victim to. Morgan takes on the fake name and persona of ‘Charlotte Turner’, but as the mystery of Hollyhock asylum grows and mutates into something unexpected, so too does the personality of Charlotte. The doubling of identities and personas is not a new phenomenon in horror, and there are various previous examples of this being exploited. The same cannot be said for Panatier, who I found to be careful and respectful. Morgan and her constructed persona Charlotte are diametrically opposed, and this manifests itself in fears that I had never really considered. In particular, the idea of acting in a way so inherently different to your core values but then later having no memory of it, and the heightened effects of imposter syndrome in a place that strips you of your core identity. Hollyhock asylum is a place of disorientation and exploitation, and this acts as fertile ground for conversations around autonomy and personal identity.
The novel falls into three distinct and interchanging formats: Morgan in the asylum, investigative transcripts involving Morgan and detectives following the destruction of Hollyhock, and text message transcripts between Morgan and her sister Hadleigh that take place months and years before the events of the story. Sometimes I struggle with alternating character perspectives or timelines, but I felt that this worked particularly well with this novel. Our time spent in the asylum begins in mystery and slowly devolves into madness, and these interludes give much needed missing information and/or respite from the asylum.
Hollyhock is a woman-only asylum and without going into spoiler territory, the gendered aspect of the hospital is front and central. Many of the women incarcerated are held with a condition known as ‘domestic psychosis’, an indiscriminate illness based on ‘delusions’ and ‘hallucinations’. The likeness to hysteria, an archaic ‘condition’ used purely for the control and manipulation of women, seems obvious and deliberate. Even while science and medicine progress for the better, the misogyny infused in the politics of it all remains as present and rampant as ever.
Indeed, the novel’s relevance to the world today is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the novel. We would all love to lock away the dreadful experimental treatments that patients have endured, we would all love to move past how mental illness has been weaponised as a method of manipulating women and their autonomy, but this is not the reality. Panatier exposes the dreadful reality of our present by releasing the ghosts of the past, showing that redemption is still far far away.
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