Published by Pan, 2013.ISBN: 978 1 4472 0499 2
Where does psychological
thriller end and creepy horror begin?
That’s a question F R Tallis must have
asked himself. The difference would appear to be that in the former, the
mysteries are explained, while in the latter the reader is left thoroughly
spooked and free to draw his or her own conclusions about the supernatural.
A clinical psychologist by profession,
as Frank Tallis he is the author of half a dozen murder mysteries set in
Sigmund Freud’s Vienna and a couple of other historical mysteries; in this
other guise he veers towards the gothic.
The background of The Sleep Room
is unashamedly based on the work of an eminent psychiatrist of the time, who
advocated finding treatments for the symptoms of mental illness rather than the
Freudian approach of seeking out the causes. One of his treatments was
narcosis, or extended sleep. Tallis picks up this idea and runs with it: a
stark basement room in which six severely disturbed women sleep for twenty-one
hours a day over a period of months, with fearful consequences.
The setting is a bleak house set up as
a hospital in the eerie countryside of 1950s Suffolk, where the marshes meet
the sea. The well-drawn narrator is an impressionable young doctor engaged to
run the hospital by its distinguished founder. The rich ambience is very much
the stuff of classic horror stories; the doctor’s arrival is marked by a thick
mist, and strange things begin to happen almost as soon as he takes up his
post.
Tallis’s recreation of the slightly
formal language of 1950s fiction is only one aspect of his skilful construction
of the claustrophobic atmosphere beloved of M R James and H P Lovecraft. His
own clinical background is very much in evidence, but so too is a fertile
imagination. He invokes classic elements of horror: whisperings in the night,
invisible hands tugging at clothes, a flame which appears out of nowhere,
objects which move on their own, vivid dreams; but set alongside the strange
manifestations of the patients’ disturbed minds, they lose none of their power
to jangle the reader’s nerves.
Unless you count the barbarous crimes
against vulnerable humanity committed by well-meaning doctors half a century
ago, The Sleep Room can’t really be described as a crime novel, or even
a psychological thriller; it’s creepy horror from beginning to end – especially
the enigmatic and distinctly spooky ending. But it shows without question that
this accomplished mystery writer has more than one string to his bow.
------
Reviewer:
Lynne Patrick
F R Tallis is a
writer and clinical psychologist. He has held lecturing posts at the Institute of Psychiatry
and King's College, London.
I addition to his fiction novels he has written self help manuals (How to Stop
Worrying, Understanding Obsessions and Compulsions) non-fiction for the general
reader (Changing Minds, Hidden Minds, Love Sick), academic text books and over
thirty academic papers in international journals.
http://www.franktallis.com/
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment