The Redemption of Morgan Bright
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Named ESQUIRE'S Best Horror of 2024!
A woman checks herself into an insane asylum to solve the mystery of her sister’s murder, only to lose her memory and maybe her mind.
Hadleigh Keene died on the road 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 checks herself in.
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 to unravel, Morgan retraces Hadleigh’s footsteps, only to discover the dark secrets of Hollyhock and how deeply they are buried…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A sinister sanatorium with a history of escapes and deaths is the centerpiece of this eerie splice of psychological and supernatural horror from Panatier (The Phlebotomist). Using the alias Charlotte Turner, Morgan Bright voluntarily commits herself to the Hollyhock House, an asylum in Hay Springs, Neb., to undergo a short stint of treatment for purported "domestic psychosis." Really, Morgan is seeking to uncover the undisclosed facts behind her sister Hadleigh's death after she fled from Hollyhock two and a half years earlier. To Morgan's dismay, the character of "Charlotte" soon takes over and begins cooperating complacently with the asylum's bizarre treatment regimens—as revealed in postcommitment interviews conducted between Morgan and police and medical authorities and laced throughout the text. These transcripts suggest Morgan harbors two strong personalities in conflict with one another and call into question how much about Morgan's identity the reader can trust. Though the description of Hollyhock's strange therapies becomes repetitive in spots, Panatier conjures an unsettling mood of suspicion and disbelief from his depiction of the asylum's cultish caregivers and their oddly ritualized behavior. Fans of paranoid thrillers like Catriona Ward's Last House on Needless Street will devour this.
