ASYLUM: a thrilling horror tale by Madeline Roux

Dan Crawford cannot wait to start his summer program at New Hampshire College Prep, for once he’ll be around other teenagers who want to learn and who care about their academic futures. When he arrives at the school, he is shown to his dorm in the old sanatorium. Because the regular dorms are being renovated he and the other high schoolers are staying in the old towns asylum that was closed nearly thirty years ago because of the awful torchers and escaped mental patients.

Despite the oddness of his rooming situation, Dan manages to make friends and even lands himself a girlfriend by the first week. However, things don’t stay bright and chipper for long. While exploring the asylum Dan and his friends start to discover weird things, and begin to learn things about the asylum, and the town that the citizens are trying to keep hidden. Soon Dan begins to receive strange notes, and begins blacking out and having visions and dreams of the old torchers and methods the warden used on his patients.

One night, while Dan and his girlfriend Lucy are exploring the “locked” areas of the asylum, one of the college students acting as guide and hall monitor is found murdered in a fashion similar to one of the asylums patients. He is but the first person to be murdered, and even more have murder attempted upon them. To make matters worse, Dan has been blacking out more than ever before, and while exploring one day finds that the old warden shares his same name.

Could there be an explanation for Dan’s blackouts and the reaction people in town have toward him and his name? Is there something to the crazy experiments the old warden wrote about in his journals? Or come someone with a sick fascination for the old towns history just be acting out? Dan is determined to get to the bottom of it, even if it means finding out things about himself and his friends that he didn’t want to know.

  I really enjoyed this book, that is until the last five chapters. It was a fast paced thriller, with a lot of moments when I was truly scared and glad that my front door was locked and the lights in my house were on. I love a good horror/thriller, and the potential for this was great. Unfortunately the ending did not live up to the rest of the book.

I don’t know if the author was rushed for a deadline, backed herself into a corner, or just wanted the easy way out but the ending was rushed and overly simple. It left a lot of unanswered questions, and not the kind that makes you hope for a sequel, but the kind that makes you say WTF out loud and roll your eyes. I think the ending had so much wasted opportunities, and if the author had taken the time to actually flush out the themes and ideas of the book, maybe add an additional forty pages it would have been amazing.