Product Description

From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness.

In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage.

But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133600 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-03
• Released on: 1998-03-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com
The New Yorker review praised Patrick McGrath's "ornate, deadpan style . . . distinguished by its unusual seriousness, its lack of camp," and described Asylum as a "layered, implicating book, whose terrors and malignities aren't quite the ones we expect, and are a matter of mood and viewpoint as well as of plot." McGrath's fourth novel (his other three are also highly recommended) features a subtly deceptive narrator whose confident, musical voice seduces you--a voice that mirrors, in its meter, emotions ranging from lyrically obsessed, to meticulously fond, to cautious and stiff with horror. And the imagery is unforgettable: the grim architecture of the asylum; a ravaged human head with empty eye sockets; a drowning in a pool on a barren heath.

From Publishers Weekly
McGrath (Dr. Haggard's Disease) has a mind that revels in the toxic side of things. In this tale of headlong descent into darkness and despair, the toxicity comes from obsessional love. Stella Raphael is the lovely but dissatisfied wife of Max, a resident psychiatrist at an asylum for the criminally insane in the countryside near London. She becomes infatuated with Edgar Stark, a sculptor who murdered and mutilated his wife in a delusionary fit, and the two contrive a passionate affair when Edgar is assigned to work in the Raphaels' garden on the asylum grounds. Stealing Max's clothes, Edgar escapes to London and goes underground, where Stella eventually follows him. When he begins to manifest the same furious jealousies that led to his wife's murder, she flees home again, only to find she has ruined her husband's career. The Raphaels, with their young son, Charlie, are exiled to a remote hospital in rural Wales, where further disaster strikes as Stella drifts into her own desperate delusions. The story is told by another psychiatrist at the asylum, ostensibly through interviews with Stella. Although the doctor's own interpolations are sometimes a relief in the supercharged atmosphere, this seems an unnecessary device, and the intended frisson of his participation in the somber conclusion doesn't come off. In every other respect, however, the book is hypnotizing, with its own strange but darkly convincing pace and style; and the way in which nature and climate are woven into the fabric of the bizarre couple's strange love is masterly. 75,000 first printing; paperback rights to Vintage; rights sold in the U.K. and six European nations; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In McGrath's latest, which Random hopes will be his breakout book, the bored but gorgeous wife of a boring but successful psychiatrist launches a devastating affair with a sculptor who murdered his wife.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Top Notch Psychological Suspense
This is a classic study of obsessive love (or sex, if you will). I loved every minute of it, even the dreary second half with our lust-crazed heroine stuck in the Welsh boondocks.

Pay attention to the narrator because you will be in for a surprise! Enjoy!

Love has no limits
I wasn't sure that I liked this book at the beginning. It was slow and dark and depressing and I wasn't sure I wanted to be in that mood....I was on vacation at the beach. But I ended up devouring this book because of it's hypnotic storytelling. McGrath does an excellent job at keeping you hooked once the story gets good!
Stella, the wife of a psychiatrist, ends up falling in love with a patient in the asylum. In her desperate cry for attention, which her husband isn't giving her, she makes a fool of herself and her family by following this patient to the ends of the earth....or an underground hideout. In this story of obsessions, McGrath does a good job of showing how people come full circle in the story of life.

ASYLUM..Exellent read.
Having read four of his other books, this for me was by far the best.