100 books like Asylum

I once worked on a film shoot at the infamous Friern Barnet Asylum in London, an imposing building that boasts the longest corridor in Europe at over a third of a mile long. It was my job to lock up after filming was over each night, and to do so, I had to walk the long corridor with just a flashlight for company… and the ghosts rumoured to haunt the building! I have never forgotten the feeling of dread and despair in that place, and my heart went out to the patients who were isolated in the creepy basement wards. Barbara Taylor gives an inside perspective on this fearsome institution in her book, which is both an achingly honest account of mental illness and addiction, and a critique of community care.

I read this book during my school days, which we are often told are the best of our lives. I enjoyed school, overall, but did encounter more than my fair share of bullies and vindictive teachers. Reading in the school library became my favourite escape, and I devoured this book in one lengthy sitting. I was fascinated and appalled in equal measure by secret society The Vandals, who made the kids at my school look like rank amateurs! After reading this book, the reader is left shell-shocked and wondering if it’s better to comply or to ‘disturb the universe’ as Cormier provocatively puts it.

A man called “Pepper,” who may or may not suffer from mental illness, ends up in a locked mental ward in Queens, New York, where the entire novel takes place.

A beast, who the patients believe is the devil, comes out at night, assaulting and sometimes killing patients. Patient deaths are chalked up to suicide. The engaging, quirky characters—drugged to the gills while warehoused and essentially untreated in a public hospital—share the defining feature of being low-income and unprotected from both the supernatural and human forces that would destroy them. They must take matters into their own hands to protect themselves.

I appreciated the theme of how marginalization and isolation presented as much terror here as the supernatural. Yet, the hope and humor of the characters also kept me engaged and frequently smiling.

A deeply unsettling book, The Hospital occupies those liminal spaces that lie somewhere between illness and health, memory and madness. The narrator is admitted to the hospital to receive treatment for an unspecified disease and finds that the labyrinthine corridors and wards match those of his mind. Casablanca-born author Ahmed Bouanani was confined to a hospital bed for six months after contracting tuberculosis. Part hallucinatory fever dream and part half-remembered memoir, the book is a unique blend of Moroccan history and surrealist horror.

This slender novel marks the debut of California author Jason DeWitt and it’s a stunner.

The Patient is a creepy, clever horror story that I lost sleep over because I couldn’t put it down. It’s the tale of a young psychiatrist at a dreary asylum in New England, who, against everyone’s urgent advice, decides to take a crack at curing an “incurable” patient. 

What he learns about that patient – and the shocking climax that results – may give you nightmares, but it’s well worth the ride.

As a young man, Ken Kesey worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward and participated in CIA-funded hallucinogen studies conducted in the hospital. Looking out at the patients and nurses, he wondered what separated them.

What emerged from those experiences is the mesmeric narrator of his first book: the giant, Chief, sees the world through a terrifying poetic lens. Observant and cunning, he perceives all the forces of authority and conformity as a single machine he calls “The Combine.”

Kesey’s novel is a fable about the power of the individual to oppose any coercive larger force, even if victory isn’t certain. It’s dark, unflinching, and profoundly on the side of the freaks.    

Before I read Garnethill, my perception of the typical Glasgow crime novel protagonist was that of the hard-drinking, rule-breaking, middle-aged, divorced male detective – in other words, the usual cliché. Maureen O’Donnell shatters that. A survivor of childhood abuse, she’s treated as an unreliable eyewitness and potential murder suspect due to her mental health history and turns detective to entrap and unmask a killer who’s been targeting others like her – women whose voices are ignored because they’re deemed to be “crazy”. Packed with colourful characters and raw, angry prose, Denise Mina’s debut novel has a rough-and-ready quality compared to her later work, but which is entirely suited to the subject matter – a defiant battle cry against both the men who abuse their power and those who look the other way.

Who hasn’t looked for advice on how to be happy? I found wisdom in this book that, in addition to laughing, it made me reflect.

I realized that happiness is not an objective; it is in us, in the way we feel about ourselves. This book came to my hands when I was lost in life and gave me direction. It made me see that I was like Hector, living in the past, wondering how my life could be if I only had done something different. I learned that first, I needed to see what makes me happy.

While reading it, I took several notes that later helped me to order my own life and see who I was. And now I can share that it worked! This book was a lifesaver for me.

The Eye in the Door continues Barker’s exploration of the morality of war through its impacts on human beings.  While she continues the journeys of Dr. W. H. R. Rivers and Siegried Sassoon, she explores in great detail the experience of Lieutenant Billy Prior, a complex character who works as a domestic intelligence agent.  Prior is torn between his own antiwar feelings and his working class and bisexual identities as he spies on pacifists, homosexuals, and government critics.

An absolutely gorgeous autobiography that never for a moment bogs down in the details, but soars above the timeline of Yalom's life by concerning itself chiefly with glimmers of insight, events that have lived on in his unconscious and formed him into the healer he became. Like all of Yalom's best work, I found myself reading it slowly, savoring every word. The honesty, if you open yourself to it, and accept that he really is telling you the honest to god truth, smacks you in the face like few authors I've ever encountered. I kept thinking, if I do enough psychotherapy for long enough, I might be able to pull off this degree of self-knowledge.