Gabino Iglesias Reviews The Redemption of Morgan Bright by Chris Panatier
The Redemption of Morgan Bright, Chris Panatier (Angry Robot 978-1-9152-028-95, $18.99, 416pp, pb) April 2024. Cover by Sarah O’Flaherty.
Chris Panatier’s The Redemption of Morgan Bright is a great psychological thriller full of mystery that slowly morphs into a full-blown horror novel. At once the story of a sister looking for answers, a narrative about a crumbling psyche, and a tale that gets progressively more mysterious with each new revelation, this is the kind of horror novel that will appeal to fans of the genre as well as to fans of dark fantasy and readers who like their thrillers with a heaping side of weirdness.
Hadleigh Keene was a patient at Hollyhock Asylum, but she died under mysterious circumstances. Desperate for answers and full of guilt, Morgan, her sister, comes up with a plan to infiltrate the asylum and get to the bottom of things. To do so, she creates a persona, a young housewife named Charlotte Turner, struggling with mental health issues. With the help of her partner, who plays the concerned husband well, Morgan gets into Hollyhock, and she soon discovers that something is very wrong there. Also, Charlotte starts taking control of Morgan, and she doesn’t always know it’s happening. As her identity unravels and her mental health declines inside Hollyhock, Morgan learns more and more about the strange world her sister inhabited before her death. Then everything goes wrong, and a lot of people die.
Writing about – and from the perspectives of characters suffering from – dissociative identity disorder isn’t new, but Panatier does it well and keeps the mystery and tension going for most of the novel. Also, readers get the story not only from the perspectives of Morgan and Charlotte, but also through chapters comprised of text messages and transcriptions from police interviews. The text message and transcription chapters go by very quickly, which means this novel is a very easy read despite its length. Panatier sustains great pacing throughout even when showing readers the world inside Hollyhock, including their amazing meals and the abusive ways patients are treated behind its walls.
There is a very fine line between cosmic horror and the darker side of dark fantasy, and The Redemption of Martin Bright inhabits that interstitial space very well. Panatier is a talented storyteller, and this one made me an instant fan.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.
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