A new kind of Gothic -- ten stars

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	• Asylum Patrick Mcgrath Vintage, 1998 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 91 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Love has no limits

I wasn't sure that I liked this book at the beginning. It was slow and dark and depressing and I wasn't sure I wanted to be in that mood....I was on vacation at the beach. But I ended up devouring this book because of it's hypnotic storytelling. McGrath does an excellent job at keeping you hooked once the story gets good!
Stella, the wife of a psychiatrist, ends up falling in love with a patient in the asylum. In her desperate cry for attention, which her husband isn't giving her, she makes a fool of herself and her family by following this patient to the ends of the earth....or an underground hideout. In this story of obsessions, McGrath does a good job of showing how people come full circle in the story of life.

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ASYLUM..Exellent read.

Having read four of his other books, this for me was by far the best.

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Thought Provoking...

It's the summer of 1953 when Stella Raphael first meets Edgar Stark at the maximum security psychiatric hospital where her husband is the deputy superintendent, Edgar is a patient confined for the brutal murder of his wife. Stella is the restless and bored young wife of Dr. Max Raphael, a reserved and melancholy man. She is not satisfied by her relationship with her husband and soon after they meet Edgar and Stella begin an all consuming love affair.

Dr. Peter Cleve, eminent forensic psychiatrist at the hospital, narrates and psychoanalyses Stella's behavior and the chain of events that unfold after she and Edgar begin their affair. While Stella's behavior seems desperately insane we can also understand to a degree why Stella behaves as she does as we listen to the detailed steps of her downward spiral as seen by Dr Cleve. And while we may judge her harshly for her choices we feel sympathy for her at the same time.

I thought this was a very well written book the relationships and dynamics between characters were very realistic and believable. I liked the narrator's dissection of Stella and her behavior and her relationship with her husband, it was insightful and felt very authentic.

My only disappointment lies in the fact that I had expectations of a much more suspenseful story, it didn't have the tension I was hoping for and because of that I was a little disappointed. Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be "A tour de force of suspense." like the reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle did.

I think this would make a great book club choice...for the right book club mind you, there is plenty to talk about like...What is love? obsession? passion? what is crazy? who gets to decide? what if those who are judging are as crazy as those they sit in judgment of?

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A new kind of Gothic -- ten stars

Born in 1950, British author Patrick McGrath grew up near what was originally called Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne-in-Berkshire, England. The hospital was later changed to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in an attempt to lessen the stigma the former name engendered.

Mr. McGrath's father was the medical superintendent at Broadmoor, and I can only speculate as to whether or not this early exposure to the psychiatric field influenced his writing; but whatever the influence, it must have imparted to Patrick McGrath a firm understanding of the personality disorder, and its deleterious effects when left unchecked. _Asylum_ is a fine example of how some types of abnormal personalities choose their relationships, and eventually self destruct.

The year is 1959, and beautiful Stella Raphael, at once engaging and aloof, intelligent but bored, is married to the predictable and unimaginative, avoidant but melancholy Max Raphael, the new deputy superintendent of a maximum-security mental hospital in the English countryside, where the couple have recently relocated to with their young son, Charlie. Wondering about Stella's "unconscious life," the avuncular senior staff psychiatrist at the hospital, Peter Cleave, reveals her story in first person POV against the Gothic backdrop of the hospital itself, whose immuring architecture only fuels Stella's ennui, and sends her spiraling down into the arms of the paranoid personality Edgar Stark, an inmate at the asylum. It matters not to the histrionic Stella that Edgar is imprisoned there because he murdered his wife in a most grisly manner. She is too driven by her inner demons to question her volatile attraction to the man, who is made all the more appealing by virtue of his being an artist and a sculptor.

Very cleverly sewn into the story is the mysterious third player in this tragedy, the narcissistic character, who in a sense orchestrates the entire drama. But it is up to you, the reader, to discover who this narcissist might be.

Patrick McGrath has been called the creator of the "new Gothic" in story telling, and rightly so, because it is not the outer trappings that imprison Stella in this engrossing tale of obsessive love, but rather her internal psychological dynamics that hold her prisoner and torment her, ultimately endangering her life, and the lives of everyone closest to her.

An intelligent literary novel, Asylum is highly recommended for those who enjoy a good psychological thriller. Once I started this novel I could not put it down.

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Top Notch Psychological Suspense

This is a classic study of obsessive love (or sex, if you will). I loved every minute of it, even the dreary second half with our lust-crazed heroine stuck in the Welsh boondocks.

Pay attention to the narrator because you will be in for a surprise! Enjoy!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness.

In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage.

But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

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