REVIEW: Asylum (book) by Madeleine Roux

Asylum is YA horror. I bought my copy brand new.

Review:

Sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford is excited to spend his summer taking part in the New Hampshire College Prep program - he'll finally be around people who care about their particular academic interests as much as he does about his.

Students in the program will all be staying at the Brookline Dorm, which used to be a psychiatric hospital. Dan and two new friends of his, Abby and Jordan, slip into one of the closed off areas one night and discover abandoned equipment, photographs, old patient files, and more. Dan has always had issues with weird blank spots in his memory, but he suddenly finds the problem getting worse. He has visions of being one of the patients at the hospital, and he feels an odd connection to the hospital's warden. Abby, too, discovers that she has an unexpected connection to this place.

It's all just creepy and unsettling, until the murders start. Is one of the students the killer, or is it one of the former patients, somehow back and getting revenge for the horrific things they experienced at the hospital?

The best thing about this book is the photographs it's illustrated with, some of which are from actual asylums and some of which are custom creations for this book. They have all the creepy, chilling atmosphere that the book itself unfortunately does not.

This was supposed to be a YA novel starring a 16-year-old boy, but it read like stiff Middle Grade starring a younger character, Dan's laser-like focus on Abby notwithstanding. All of the potential creepiness was muted at best. Also, I don't know whether the author intended readers to dislike Dan, but I definitely did. It felt like he became friends with Abby primarily in the hope that she'd date him, and the instant he met Jordan (who Abby had become friends with prior to meeting Dan), he became annoyingly jealous. Dan, Abby, and Jordan were supposedly an inseparable trio of friends at the start of the program, but I doubt Dan would have been half as friendly towards Jordan if Jordan hadn't mentioned that he was gay, and therefore not interested in Abby that way.

Overall, this wasn't as good or as creepy as the wonderful cover image had me hoping it'd be. I'm glad I didn't buy the second book along with this first one.