'Neath the pumpkin patch

Hello!

Sticking with the horror again today, for one of the most brutal and mind-bending books I’ve read for a while, Long Island Memorial by Clayton W. Snyder and Michael R.Fletcher.

When a catastrophic accident at Brookhaven National Laboratory tears a hole in the fabric of reality, Long Island Memorial Hospital becomes ground zero for something far worse than any medical emergency. The wounded scientists flooding the ER bring more than injuries with them — they bring the power to make belief real. Every fear, every faith, every delusion harbored by the hospital’s staff begins to bleed into the world around them.

Veda Choudhary is a custodian who doesn’t believe in God, ghosts, or anything she can’t mop up. That makes her the only sane person in a building rapidly coming apart at the seams — and possibly the only one who can stop it. Marcus Albright is the hospital’s brilliant, sociopathic star surgeon, a man whose god complex was always going to be dangerous. In a world where belief reshapes reality, he becomes something genuinely divine. And he has plans.

Have you ever had a lucid dream? One of those that you know that things aren’t quite right, everything is off, but you can’t put your finger on it and your brain scrambles to make logic fit what you’re experiencing. Even when logic absolutely won’t work there, and you’re making huge leaps just to make it make sense in the moment?

Well, that is Long Island Memorial.

Having read both Fletcher and Snyders’ other words, I was intrigued to see how they would bring their particular brands of darkness and madness to bear in a real life setting. Spectacularly as it turns out – although it did take me a few chapters to warm up to this one, and I have to admit that at one point I thought it might even be a very rare DNF for me…and then it sank it claws beneath my skin and wouldn’t let go for the rest of the book. There were some elements that sat wrong with me, but generally it was more to do with the people before the horror kicked in, people I certainly wouldn’t want working in a hospital even before you get to delusions and body horror and psychological horror; and even as everything and everyone sank into the madness, some of those elements would peek their head above the parapet again which was a little niggle. However, as a general rule they reaped what they sowed.

I feel like the real world setting was what really contributed to that lucid dream feeling, because it’s our world, we think we know how it should work. We saw the characters believing and arguing about how things should work, even as logic flew out the window. We know the rules. Until Fletcher and Snyder decided we didn’t; but I think that was one of the reasons the horror worked so well – because we had that grounding, we knew it was wrong…but we didn’t know why, and neither did the characters, and that uncertainty, that fear of the unknown was an extra layer to the fear of the horrors unfolding.

‘Was it possible to become a god through faith or genetics?’

What I did really like was that this book ran the gauntlet of horror – from delusions and hallucinations, to gore (and lots of different bodily pieces and fluid), to body horror; and sometimes some horrifying, brutal chimera of all of them at once. And again, with that grounding in the real world – we could see how some of the characters had got to that point, like Marcus with his god complex, to the fears manifesting, to cracks and weaknesses in each person’s psyche bleeding out for the world to see. It also asked many questions about science, and faith, and human nature, not all of them answered directly, some answered through the actions of the characters (willing or not), and others unwound more directly. I liked Veda a lot, because she was a nexus for so many of these questions and characters, and even for the reader, she was an anchor point for us amongst the madness, and she asked the questions we wanted to ask, her doubts were ours and when she wobbled, we felt the horror close in.

There was a long buildup to finally getting the answers, and yet the relentlessness of the writing and the events meant that the book felt like it passed in a blink of an eye, because you couldn’t look away. And it meant that the moment that puzzle piece slipped into place (as much as it could, in a world still all to pot), was such a ah-hah moment, followed immediately by an emotional ‘oh no’, because the solution was suitably horrifying and costly.

This is one of those books that when I closed the last page, I honestly wasn’t sure what I had just read. To be honest, I’m still not sure. However, it was also one of those books that when I was reading it, I couldn’t stop, and when real life got in the way, I was thinking about when I could get back to it. Part of it was the buildup to the puzzle pieces about what was happening sliding into place, but I think as well because the horror – as outlandish, and fever dream-esque it was at times, was ultimately rooted very much in the human – it made for a compelling need to keep reading and see where it would go. I will say, this absolutely not going to be a book for everyone, and the trigger list would be long and complex; but if you want a brutal, devastatingly human (for all the inhuman elements) horror then I can strongly recommend this one.