Book Review: The Asylum by Karen Coles

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage.”

📚

It’s 1906 and five years have passed since Maud Lovell’s incarceration at Angelton Lunatic Asylum. She remembers nothing of how she came to be there, nor the world beyond, and is overwhelmed by her harsh surroundings, supposedly imposed due to her hysteria, instability, dishonesty, and violent outbursts. But when a kind new doctor arrives who’s determined to help her, Maud realizes that not only is there much more to her shrouded past than she imagined, but her imprisonment and high medication doses actually function as a gag order. And while exposing the grisly truth may grant her freedom, it may also unleash a deep-seeded desire for vengeance.

The Asylum is a riveting, rage-fueled account of cruelty, callousness, and insidiousness where helpless victims of circumstance — namely women — are used, abused, and tossed aside. The reading journey is a visceral, cringe-worthy, anxiety-inducing experience that intersperses Maud’s present-day (1906) life in Angelton with memories, exhumed via hypnosis. These realities expose an intelligent, rational, capable woman a far cry from the alleged raving madwoman, one harshly victimized and riven with trauma.

This is not a feel-good story; it’s a horrifying and infuriating psychological horror tale where the female body functions as a prime gothic element: an entity borne of dark histories cloaked in deceit, underscored by secrets, and ultimately left to rot — a forsaken vessel as eerie, intense, foreboding, and telling as an abandoned and decaying manor. It’s a disturbing, supremely horrific ordeal achieved through immersive storytelling, indelible tragedy, maddening oppression, and terrifying plausibility, all of which combine to form a haunting and unforgettable exploration of intent, injustice, and misogyny; trust, betrayal, and gaslighting; murder, abuse, and dehumanization; and compassion, forgiveness, and revenge. This was a fantastic March/April 2024 selection for the Gothic Ghouls Book Club and should make for an interesting discussion.

❤Amanda