The building on New York’s East Side that used to house Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital has inspired tales of horror from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and served as the model for Arkham Asylum in fictional Gotham City. For novelist Robin Cook, who interned there in the 1960s, it’s the perfect setting for his latest medical thriller.
“Bellevue” is set in the present day, but hearkens often to the hospital’s controversial and storied past. The plot centers around 23-year-old Mitt Fuller, embarking on his surgical residency at the iconic hospital, now part of the New York University system. Mitt’s “long and impressive medical pedigree” goes back more than 400 years and includes three previous surgeons and a psychiatrist. It’s always been Mitt’s dream to follow in his forefathers’ footsteps.
But this is a Robin Cook novel, so readers shouldn’t be surprised that Mitt’s dream slowly becomes a nightmare. Cook does a nice job of drawing readers into the tale, not horrifying them all at once. Mitt possesses a little precognitive power and can sometimes see things before they happen or sense when he’s in danger. So when forceps start moving of their own accord during a procedure or sutures untie themselves, readers and Mitt get a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.
Readers learn early in the story why the hospital is haunted, but dramatic irony is at play for more than a hundred pages as Mitt assembles the puzzle and unearths his family’s buried secrets. Mitt’s medical training and belief in science don’t exactly square with a haunted hospital, but when he meets another hospital employee whose family has a history at the institution, together they put together the rest of the pieces.
The denouement is jarring, but feels earned. Cook has told a tale that delivers a measure of justice for some patients, while preserving the dreadful mystique spelled out on top of the “decorative rusty wrought iron fence” at the southeastern corner of First Avenue and 30th Street: B-E-L-L-E-V-U-E.
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