Two things are noteworthy about the cover of The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident. First, the white lettering on its front cover glows ominously in the dark. The unexpected effect is eerie and a little unsettling. The second is on the back cover, next to the bar code, in tiny red letters: Fiction. Druse's Journal is a novel, a tie-in to the upcoming Stephen King TV series, Kingdom Hospital. Hyperion did something similar with the Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, a fake diary linked to Rose Red. Though that book, too, proclaimed itself as fiction, a lot of people were fooled by it and some felt cheated when they discovered that Ellen Rimbauer, the haunted mansion and the book's putative editor, Joyce Reardon, were all fictional constructs. The diary was a bestseller, in part because many people believed the true author was King himself. Speculation has already begun about the identity of the new book's author, who was revealed to be Kingdom Hospital co-writer Richard Dooling. The volume opens with a letter to King by Eleanor (Sally to her friends) Druse, asking for his help in carrying out her research into the events at Kingdom Hospital in Maine, where she has uncovered an otherworldly crisis. She is sending the author her journals, recorded between late 2002 and 2003. Septuagenarian Sally Druse is a regular volunteer and occasional patient at Kingdom Hospital, well known by staff and patients alike. One of her oldest friends, Madeline Kruger, is hospitalized on a stormy winter night after attempting suicide. In 1939, Sally and Maddy were patients together in the old Kingdom Hospital, suffering from whooping cough just before the hospital burned to the ground. In her suicide note, Maddy leaves a message indicating that something happened to them sixty years ago that Sally has successfully banished from her memory. Perhaps something related to the mysterious lesion that appears on a brain scan taken after Sally collapses and strikes her head when she witnesses something horrible at Kingdom Hospital later that night. Sally is a believer in mystical events and often conducts séances with her fellow patients at the hospital. She carries healing crystals and meditates to try to communicate with those who have passed on before her. Now, after Maddy's deathbed revelation, Sally becomes aware that the tormented spirit of a young girl haunts Kingdom Hospital, struggling to convey another message. Sally's unambitious, beleaguered son Bobby, an orderly at Kingdom Hospital, is her eyes and ears at the hospital and among its old records. Sally needs Maddy's papers to find out what she has been repressing for six decades while she simultaneously deals with the persistent spirits at the hospital—among them a sinister shade she calls Dr. Rat—and the various levels of incompetence exhibited by the hospital's staff, including scalpel-happy Dr. Stegman, in exile from Boston General, who has a trail of surgical horror stories on his record. Sally's Journal overlaps some of the events to be played out during the fifteen-hour series, but it also provides backstory only available to readers of this book. Dooling knows his medicine, especially neuroscience, and the volume makes for interesting reading on its own, though it ends with Sally's mission only partly complete. To discover more about the mysteries being played out in Kingdom Hospital, readers will have to check out the miniseries, which is available on DVD. Web site and all contents © Copyright Bev Vincent 2007. All rights reserved. |
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