The Asylum By John Edward Ames

The Asylum
By John Edward Ames
1994 Zebra
Paperback, 303 pages

 

                This one was pretty tough for me to make it through, but I did.

 

                Stereotype detective Reno Sloan (streeee-rike one!) finds himself and his endless annoying quipping embroiled in bizarre plot where teenagers in New Orleans are suddenly losing their minds and winding up in the Cypress Island Clinic, where they receive treatment and a cure. One patient, with psychic abilities, commits a gruesome suicide and her sister (with whom she can communicate, even post-death) hires the detective to get some answers.

 

                It seems the CIC has more to it than meets the eye. The top dog, Dr. Malachi Feldman (I’m not making that up) has created a new drug that will make the user hallucinate and go nutzoid. What better way to fill the clinic than to get the topical drug on to rich families’ teenagers and “cure” them by just keeping them there. His two cartoon-character henchmen infect the kids, and they sit back and wait. Just got to watch out for those pesky psychic kids. There may be more than one.

 

                OK, the premise here is all right and the improbable ending had some excitement to it but overall, if you don’t like Reno (and really, how could you?), you won’t enjoy the book. He is such a caricature, straight out of a 40s dime detective novel. He gets all the women, even though he disrespects them left and right, and every other character in the book is a paper-thin, cookie-cutter person, merely there for Sloan to play off. Some plot twists fail because it gets hard to remember who is who among the lesser players.

 

                Ames obviously sat at his typewriter with a street map of New Orleans (his home at the time) and traced a line around the city and then just gave directions as our hero Reno stalked the city in his dilapidated car. He mentions most of the obvious spots. (I was waiting for Reno to grab a beignet at Café du Monde, but Ames skipped that landmark.) Ames has a few other horror novels to his credit, but he is mostly known for Western Fiction. I do have one of his other horrors in my huge TBR pile, but I’m not hurrying to read it. And I’m not keeping The Asylum.