Review: Inside The Asylum

Inside The Asylum by Mary SanGiovanni
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

INSIDE THE ASYLUM is the third book in Mary SanGiovanni's "Kathy Ryan Series," after BEHIND THE DOOR and CHILLS. I marveled at the first two in the series: Kathy Ryan is an incredibly complex character, vulnerable yet tough, horribly abused in childhood so empathetic to other victims, wise in the ways of the Otherworld. Her foil is her horrible brother Toby, once her protector, then her assailant, a man who committed multiple brutal rape-murders and threatened the same to his sister.

In INSIDE THE ASYLUM, Kathy, who is a bit of a roving consultant on the occult, is called into the hospital for the criminally insane where her brother Toby is incarcerated. Another inmate, Henry Banks, who suffered an incredibly horrific childhood and adolescence at the hands of family members, long ago created for himself a fantasy realm into which to retreat; but Henry's imagination is so powerful that it has created "tulpas," entities which now are determined on living for themselves, not as illusionary "imaginary friends" anymore.

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