Customer Reviews

The Asylum Prophecies

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A coalition of terrorists have merged with a plan to deploy Operation Dragon's Teeth that will make 9/11 look like a quiet day at the park. The only person outside of gangs who knows of the specifics of the upcoming assault is Raven Slade, the daughter of a CIA field operative; resident of a mental institution in Athens, Greece as she suffers from multiple personality disorder (MPD) and talks with her dead sister.

Her father hypnotized Raven to insure she cannot reveal what she knows about 17N and MeK to anyone even the FBI or CIA until they are defeated. However, she is kidnapped and tortured by one of the terrorist groups, the 17N. Rookie FBI agent Frank Dugan is sent to Europe to prevent the plot scheduled for 17 November by the Mujhadeen-e Kalq starting with rescuing Raven so he can learn what she knows.

This is a fast-paced action-packed thriller from the strange opening scene in the Athens hospital and never slows down until the climax. However, readers need to set aside their plausibility meter as several spins like the hypnosis and sending a novice to prevent a major terrorist attack seem farfetched even with late denouements. Still fans of Daniel Keyes will enjoy this exciting tale mostly seen through the hypnotized mindset of an alleged MPD sufferer with voices on her head.

Harriet Klausner

I was given an advance copy of "The Asylum Prophecies" by Daniel Keyes, billed as a psychological thriller. Had to read it through to the end, not because it was thrilling, but just to see how he was going to bring this mess to a close.

Now, let me start with my self-professed love for writers who aren't necessarily the deepest of thinkers, but who can spin a good yarn. I even enjoyed "The DaVinci Code" until the end, when it seemed to me that Dan Brown threw in more than a few contrivances just to get the darn thing over and done with.

But back to this book. The short book report is "it sucks." Now, as to how and why it sucks? Let me count the ways. It's all over the place with plot devices, geography, and characters. Geographically is probably the easiest to follow, because Keyes lets you know where you are with chapter headings.

The plot is designed to scare American audiences by using not one, but two obscure terrorist organizations, 17N (Greek) and MEK (Middle-Eastern). All of the information he uses about 17N can be found in one Wikipedia article. Some information about MEK may be made up by Keyes or he may have gotten it from other sources; it sounds better to have a female army all of whom have taken vows of chastity than just another splinter group in Iraq that was disarmed in 2003.

The Prophecies are a series of quatrains that give in riddles the plan for a major terrorist attack on the United States, including targets, weapons, and methods of delivery. Only one living person knows all the riddles, and as they are revealed we realize these quatrains are a terrible thing to do to poetry.

The characters are the worst. There isn't a sympathetic or even likable one in the bunch. The main character, Raven, is a young lady with borderline personality disorder who hears the voice of her stillborn twin in her head. Sometimes, in an attempt to make things interesting, the twin takes over, but she's no more sympathetic than Raven. They both seem to be little more than bundles of disorders, phobias, histrionics and suggestibility, all of which are hammered at the reader over and over again. When you get toward the end of the book and for about the thousandth time it is mentioned that pyrophobia is fear of file and acrophobia is fear of heights, you find yourself muttering "I get it, I get it." Other times you're saying "Yeah, yeah, she disassociating again. Now can we get on with it?"

Everyone else is a personality-deprived caricature. The terrorist men all go on about the evil capitalists while wanting to get into the blonde woman's pants. The terrorist women all go on about the evil capitalist infidels while wanting to get the blonde woman into a headscarf. The FBI agent goes on about trying to solve the riddles, while wanting to get the blonde woman into psychiatric care.

And just when things get interesting, when the main character finally does something besides being dragged around the world and showing off her symptoms, the narrative comes to a screeching halt by bringing in a psychiatrist with a boring back story, and then he goes on about Freudian versus Jungian treatment while wanting to get into the blonde woman's brain.

By the end of it, I was almost hoping the terrorist attack would happen -- at least it would put all these people and with luck, the reader, out of our collective misery.