Inside the Asylum by Mary SanGiovanni Book Tour and Giveaway with Personal Reviews!
Inside
the Asylum
A
Kathy Ryan Novel #2
by
Mary SanGiovanni
Genre:
Supernatural Horror
Pub
Date: 5/7/19
From
“master of cosmic horror” (Library Journal) Mary
SanGiovanni, comes the latest terrifying novel featuring occult
specialist Kathy Ryan . . .
A
mind is a terrible thing to destroy . . .
Kathy
has been hired to assess the threat of patient Henry Banks, an inmate
at the Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the
same hospital where her brother is housed. Her employers believe that
Henry has the ability to open doors to other dimensions with his
mind—making him one of the most dangerous men in modern history.
Because unbeknownst to Kathy, her clients are affiliated with certain
government organizations that investigate people like Henry—and the
potential to weaponize such abilities.
What
Kathy comes to understand in interviewing Henry, and in her
unavoidable run-ins with her brother, is that Henry can indeed use
his mind to create “Tulpas”—worlds, people, and creatures so
vivid they come to actual life. But now they want life outside of
Henry. And they'll stop at nothing to complete their emancipation.
It's up to Kathy—with her brother's help—to stop them, and if
possible, to save Henry before the Tulpas take him over—and
everything else around him.
Chapter 1
March twenty-seventh marked three years
since Henry Banks had woken up from the coma. He kept track in a day
planner, with new calendar refills for subsequent years, by drawing a
symbol he had been taught by his friends in the upper right hand
corner of each day’s page. Other than therapy sessions, he had no
real appointments anymore, but Henry jotted down notes about the
day’s events, things he learned or discovered, and each night
before bed, he drew that symbol of his far-reaching goals.
Journaling, even Henry’s odd version of it, was encouraged and
allowed to continue as a means of reconnecting with one’s self and
feelings. His was more of an odd, disjointed grimoire of his mind,
but that seemed to be okay, too. He never forgot, not even during the
trial when his mind was…elsewhere. On days he couldn’t get to the
planner, Maisie made sure that at least the days were marked. It was
important to him. He never forgot, so neither did she. Every day that passed reminded him that
he was drifting farther and farther from the rest of humanity, so
Henry didn’t think the three-year anniversary was cause for
celebration. Dr. Pam Ulster did, though, or at least convincingly
pretended to. Every year prior, she had suggested Henry do something
nice for himself to commemorate his “return to the world.” The
irony was not lost on him. He didn’t see how he was supposed to do
much of anything since the orderlies, who were not big on
celebrations, watched him like hawks. Even if he wanted to, what
could he really give himself in his current situation? A walk in the
sunshine around the hospital grounds? An extra muffin with breakfast?
Anything else—anything worthwhile—would be noticed and probably
taken away. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d come
back from the dead. He’d just come back from…somewhere else. Henry figured other people would have
had reason to celebrate March twenty-seventh if he’d died instead
of coming out of that coma. Maybe that should have happened, but it
didn’t. Maisie, Orrin, Edgar, and the Others made sure of that.
They’d come out of Ayteilu and saved him. Or maybe they were right,
and he had saved them. The police and the lawyers and the
doctors told him he’d done something bad to the teenagers in his
basement right before the coma. He couldn’t remember much about
that. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been the one who’d done it,
but it was his fault all the same. He’d seen those teenagers
before; they hung around outside the Dollar Tree and said mean things
to him from behind the safety of their cigarette smoke clouds when he
went to shop there. The girl was pretty, but she was sharp where she
should have been soft, like something made of glass or porcelain,
something whose temper could shatter her into a thousand jagged,
deadly pieces. The three guys were mostly messy mops of hair, black
trench coats, and jeans. Their faces didn’t matter to him. Their
fists did, and their words; they often threatened the former with the
latter. Henry wasn’t even sure if they’d had eyes, but he
imagined that if they did, those eyes were cold. They made fun of the holes in his
t-shirts and the way he walked and the scar on his shaved head. They
made fun of the burn marks on the back of his shoulder and neck and
the way he growled at them instead of using words. Still, they had
always been an away-problem, an outside-the-house problem, like
savage dogs on leashes. They were tethered to the Dollar Tree, and if
he could make it past them to his car and then to his home, he would
be safe. Then it turned out that they weren’t
on leashes. They could move anywhere they wanted. And they had chosen
to break into his house, his safe space. They’d
brought baseball bats and knives. The Viper and the Others had come
simply to protect him. Sometimes, Henry thought he should have
started keeping count in his planner on that night. Dr. Ulster had asked him once during a
session why he bothered to maintain such meticulous records of the
past three years if he honestly believed everything in his life had
fallen apart since the coma. Why approach the planner as a constant
reminder of his deterioration, then? Why not just put the past behind
him and focus on getting better? Henry had told her then the truth about
the Others, just like he had told the police when they found what was
left of the four teenagers in his basement. He told them about
Ayteilu and its tendency to swallow up reality. He’d told them
about Maisie and Orrin and Edgar and all the Others. He’d even told
them about the Viper. Maisie said that was okay. The problem was, he
couldn’t show the police or Dr. Ulster, so they hadn’t
believed. He couldn’t make it all happen on command, not back then.
But he was learning, and over the last 1,095 days, he was steadily
growing better at it. What he didn’t tell anyone was that in three
days’ time, as set forth by Edgar’s prediction, he’d have
complete control in summoning the Others at will and opening the way
to Ayteilu. The Others hadn’t wanted him to share that part with
anyone else. Henry peered through the gloom of his
bedroom. His cot was against the wall across from the door, which of
course was locked now that it was lights out. On the far side of the
room was the door to his simple bathroom—one sink, one toilet, both
gleaming white—and next to that door was a small closet in which
hung his hospital-issued clothes, soft and harmless. No zipper teeth
or sharp metal claws there, not even buttons or laces. Beneath the
clothes, like obedient lapdogs curled up on the closet floor for the
night, were a pair of loafers and a pair of slippers. Against the
back wall near where the head of his cot lay was a small, barred
window. The orderlies could open it sometimes to air the room out but
they had keys to do that and were allowed to reach through the bars.
That night, his window was closed but Henry didn’t mind. He just
liked having one, and from his, he could see the parking lot. Some
people liked seeing the neat, tight little lawns that constituted the
hospital grounds, but he preferred the parking lot. It reminded him
that there was still a real world out there, with normal people who
had jobs and houses and pets, and that those people could actually
leave hospitals and move freely through it. He got up from the cot and shuffled
over to the window. The moon was mostly hidden behind clouds, but in
the lot below, the arc-sodium lights illuminated patches of asphalt
in a soft melon color. Shadows skirted those halos of glow, darting
quickly from one spot to another in the dark. It wasn’t their shape
so much as their movement that Henry caught, but it was soothing all
the same to see they were down there. Probably it was Maisie who had
sent them. She was thoughtful like that. Maisie always knew when he
was sad or angry or just feeling drained. That night, Henry was exhausted. The
geliophobia had been particularly bad all day. He had shouldered the
burden of many crippling mental conditions since early childhood, but
the one that garnered the least sympathy and understanding was his
fear of people laughing at him. Decades of laughter, pressed between
the pages of his memories, always found a way to resurface, to grow
fat and loud again in his thoughts and even in his ears. When he was
stressed or tired, he could hear a chorus of guffaws and giggles,
tittering and peals from people who should have kept their damn
mouths shut. The laughter echoed in the back of his
thoughts, jarring and ugly like the squawking of angry hawks, and he
tried to put it out. Bad things happened in the dark when he
couldn’t, and he didn’t have the strength to make the bad things
go away. Not tonight. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes were dry and
burning. He shuffled back to the cot and climbed beneath the blanket.
Behind
the Door
A
Kathy Ryan Novel #1
Occult
specialist Kathy Ryan returns in this thrilling novel of paranormal
horror from Mary SanGiovanni, the author of Chills .
. .
Some doors should
never be opened . . .
In the rural town of
Zarepath, deep in the woods on the border of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, stands the Door. No one knows where it came from, and
no one knows where it leads. For generations, folks have come to the
Door seeking solace or forgiveness. They deliver a handwritten letter
asking for some emotional burden to be lifted, sealed with a mixture
of wax and their own blood, and slide it beneath the Door. Three days
later, their wish is answered—for better or worse.
Kari is a single
mother, grieving over the suicide of her teenage daughter. She made a
terrible mistake, asking the powers beyond the Door to erase the
memories of her lost child. And when she opened the Door to retrieve
her letter, she unleashed every sin, secret, and spirit ever trapped
on the other side.
Now, it falls to
occultist Kathy Ryan to seal the door before Zarepath becomes hell on
earth . . .
In the town of Zarephath, Pennsylvania,
just past the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border and northwest of
Dingmans Ferry out by the Delaware Water Gap, there is a Door. Many stories about it form a
particularly colorful subset of the local lore of the town and its
surrounding woods, streams, and lakes. Most of them relate the same
essential series of events, beginning with a burden of no small
psychological impact, progressing to a twilight trip through the
southwestern corner of the woods near Zarephath, and arriving at a
door. Numerous variations detail what, exactly, must be presented at
the door and how, but ultimately, these stories end with an
unburdening of the soul and, more or less, happy endings. It is said
“more or less” because such endings are arbitrarily more or less
agreeable to the individuals involved than the situations prior to
their visit to the Door of Zarephath. More times than not, the “less”
wins out. There are some old folks in town,
snow- and storm cloud–haired sept and octogenarians who sip coffee
and people-watch from the local diner or gather on front porches at
dusk or over the counter at Ed’s Hardware to trade stories of Korea
and Vietnam, and in one venerable case, World War II, and it’s said
they know a thing or two about that door. The old-timers remember the
desperation of postwar addictions and nightmares and what they used
to call shell shock, of families they couldn’t help wearing down or
beating up or tearing apart, despite their best efforts to hold
things together. They remember carrying burdens, often buried but
never very deeply, beneath their conscious thoughts, burdens that
crawled their way up from oblivion and into nightmares and flashbacks
when the darkness of booze or even just the night took over men who
had once been children and who were expected to be men. They remember
late-night pilgrimages through the forest on the outskirts of town,
trekking miles in through rain or dark or frost-laced wind to find
that door, and lay their sins and sorrows at its feet. And they
remember that sometimes, forgetting proved to be worse. The old women too remember bruises
and battered faces and blackouts. They remember cheating husbands and
cancers and unwanted pregnancies and miscarriages and daughters being
touched where they shouldn’t by men who should have protected them.
The old women remember the Door in Zarephath being a secret, almost
sacred equalizer that older women imparted to younger women, a means
of power passed from one group whose hands were socially and
conventionally tied to another. And they remember watching strong
women fall apart under the weight of that power. And these old folks remember trying
once to burn the door down, but of course, that hadn’t worked. The
Door in Zarephath won’t burn because it isn’t made of any wood of
this earth, anything beholden to the voracious appetite of fire. It
had an appetite of its own that night, and no one has tried to burn
it down since. Rather, the old-timers have learned to stay away from
it, for the most part, to relegate the knowledge of its location and
its promises to the same dusty old chests in the mind that the worst
of their war stories are kept. There’s an unspoken agreement that
as far as the Door in Zarephath goes, the young people can fend for
themselves. While the folks in Zarephath won’t stop a person from
using the Door, they aren’t usually inclined to help anyone use it.
Not in the open, and not just anyone who asks about it. Behind some
doors are rooms hidden for good cause in places human beings were
probably never meant to know about—rooms meant never to be
entered—and the old folks of Zarephath understand that for reasons
they may never know, they were given a skeleton key to one such room.
There’s a responsibility in that, the kind whose true gravity is
maybe only recognized by those with enough years and experience and
mistakes left behind to really grasp it. People often say the old-folks’
generation were stoic, used to getting by with very little and
largely of a mind frame not prone to histrionic anxiety or useless
worry. People say it has to do with surviving the Depression and
growing up in a simpler, more rugged time. But for the old folks in
Zarephath, the strength of their fiber comes from what they
remember—and from what they have come to accept forgetting. It
comes from what they no longer choose to lay before the Door.
Mary SanGiovanni is the author of the Bram Stoker nominated novel The Hollower, its sequels Found You and The Triumvirate, Thrall, Chaos, Savage Woods, Chills—which introduced occult security consultant Kathy Ryan—as well as the novellas For Emmy, Possessing Amy, and The Fading Place, as well as numerous short stories. She has been writing fiction for over a decade, has a masters in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University, and is a member of The Authors Guild, Penn Writers, and International Thriller Writers.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive content and a giveaway!
Comments
Post a Comment