Letters From The Looney Bin by Thatcher C. Nalley

Letters From The Looney Bin ended up in my Amazon shopping cart as part of a big purchase of books for my classroom library. I hadn't heard of it before, but I ended up selecting it anyway since it was labeled an "Amazon Bestseller" and was recommended alongside other popular young adult suspense books that I did know about. Figuring that this story about a creepy asylum was something my students would like, I bought it along with the rest.

When it arrived, I was surprised to see that it looked...different than I expected. The font inside looked weird and the title pages didn't look the same as in other books. A little investigation soon revealed that this was a self-published work from an independent author. I don't usually seek out works like this, but I wasn't really bothered by it because I remembered that this was listed as an "Amazon Bestseller." I thought maybe I had an undiscovered gem in my hands.

I like to pre-read the novels I bring to my classroom, so I stuck this on my shelf with the intent of reading it in the near-future. That was about two years ago. I know...I'm horrible. Anyway, when I saw that one of the Popsugar challenge categories this year was to read a book of letters, I remembered this odd little story, dusted it off, and dove it.

Letters From The Looney Bin tells the story of the Emerson Rose Asylum, a mental hospital that was mysteriously abandoned by all of the doctors and patients inside of it in the late 1970s. Despite investigations, the disappearances remained a mystery. No one from the facility was ever seen again. Years later, the building was set to be demolished. During the demolition process, a packet of letters was discovered stuffed inside of a mattress. The letters, all addressed to the pseudonym "Dr. Quill" were written by the patients inside Emerson Rose. The letters describe the backstories of the patients and the terrible events going on inside the asylum. Through these letters, the reader gets a deeper look at what was behind the mysterious events from years ago.

This novel had a very intriguing premise, and some moments within it were clever, but the execution was an absolute mess. I honestly feel guilty for criticizing an independent author trying to make it in the tough world of literature, but this book had numerous issues and badly needed an editor.

One major issue was a lack of proofreading. This book was full of typos, missing words, words used incorrectly/awkwardly, and paragraph layout errors. Once, a random hashtag appeared at the end of a paragraph. More than once, random numbers would appear between paragraph breaks. Such a large amount of basic mistakes was very distracting and made the novel feel like a fanfiction or a teenager's school assignment. I honestly thought that this novel was written by a seventeen or eighteen-year-old. After a bit of research, I discovered that Thatcher C. Nalley was born in 1969. Yikes.

Another issue was the voice of each character. Each of the letters in the novel was written by a different patient in the asylum, but they didn't sound all that different from each other. Nalley alternated between three personas - her "upper class" voice (which contained a lot of misused words in an attempt to sound smart), her "super crazy-person" voice, and her "normal person describing horrible things in an abnormally calm way" voice. The letters basically alternated between these, so most of the patients didn't really feel like distinct people. The one exception to this was her lone African American character, for which she appeared to be channeling Michael Clarke Duncan from The Green Mile. It was actually pretty offensive.

Nalley's depiction of mental illness was similarly troubling. Nearly all of her characters describe enduring either a physically or sexually abusive past (sometimes it's both). While I don't doubt that childhood abuse can be a major factor in a person's mental health, it felt incorrect for so many of the patients to have their issues stemming from the same source. Not all mental illness is borne from abuse. Similarly, not all victims of abuse go on to lose their minds. I suppose all of the dramatic backstories were an attempt to make the story seem more tragic or shocking, but it honestly got old after so many letters describing pedophile uncles, fathers, priests, etc. What's worse, all of these references make the book an inappropriate choice to bring to my classroom.

The above issues would have been somewhat mitigated by a great, engaging story. However, that aspect of the novel didn't really come together either. The letters spend more time on backstories than they do on the mystery of the asylum, which is what the book was supposed to be about. There are references to an evil doctor performing experiments on the patients and a planned patient revolt, but no real details are given to flesh out either subject. A novel like this should have fed the reader enough specifics across several letters for them to be able to piece together a more complete picture of the situation in their own minds. However, that doesn't happen here. The same few things are repeated across several letters, and the reader never gets a detailed view of what's going on. Furthermore, that story chops off abruptly before the disappearance even happens. This is to accommodate a sequel, but the way it is handled doesn't feel like an expertly crafted cliffhanger. It feels clumsy and unfinished.

Overall, what seemed to be lacking in Letters From The Looney Bin was refinement. Nalley had a great concept, but clumsy storytelling and poor editing ruined what could have been a very creepy and mysterious novel. Still, there were flashes of greatness from time to time throughout the pages. I think there's probably a really cool book in here somewhere. Unfortunately, this one was too sloppy for me.

Challenge Tally
Popsugar Challenge: (a book of letters) 21/40
Mount TBR: (previously owned) 16/60