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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A spooky read, February 20, 2008
Derik is an underachiever with a reputation for breaking hearts. High school is almost over, and he wants to achieve something before being roped into his family's business after graduation. Deciding to make a film about the abandoned mental institution on the hill, he assembles a group of classmates to join him on an overnight stay. Liza is an overachiever looking to beef up her resume. Mimi is an odd girl who only wears black. Chet is the class clown. Greta and Tony are theater geeks.
Not knowing what to expect of the hospital, or each other, the characters get sucked into a mystery involving one of the former inmates and the number 17. Their night in the hospital becomes a sort of spooky scavenger hunt as they piece together the fragments of a shattered life that ended at the hospital years ago. Trying to assuage the spirits of the place while facing down their own demons, these six teens will emerge from their night at the hospital changed forever.
Danvers State Hospital, where the book is set, is a real place located in Danvers, MA. Built in 1878, the hospital was operational for over 100 years until its closure in 1992. Since then, most of the hospital structures have been torn down to make way for residential redevelopment. The unusual architecture of the building, a central structure with wings radiating out on each side "like the wings of a bat," was built according to the plans of psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbridge. The staggered wings, a diagram of which Laurie Faria Stolarz includes in her book, were intended to give patients access to light and air. The design was meant to be curative, but like many of the other treatments practiced at Danvers State Hospital --- including the trans-orbital lobotomy --- it has become widely regarded as a monstrosity.
Stolarz has clearly mined what little information is available on Danvers State, including websites and films. PROJECT 17 owes a great deal to Brad Anderson's horror movie Session 9, which was filmed in the ruins of the hospital shortly before its demolition. It's strange to think that one of the more complete visual records of the place is Anderson's film, which is an atmospheric horror movie about an asbestos removal team crumbling beneath the pressures of the environment and their own psyches.
In addition to including her own atmospherics of an abandoned hospital (curiously well furnished with lots of files and personal effects lying around in a horrific violation of today's medical privacy laws), Stolarz touches on the history of the place and some of its more unthinkable practices. She discusses a form of hydrotherapy in which patients were restrained to hours of sitting in tubs of cold water, and covers the aforementioned trans-orbital lobotomy in which a thin, sharp instrument was inserted through the tear duct to sever the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain. Used as a treatment for the more disturbed or agitated patients, the resulting personality and behavioral changes have come to be considered intentional and criminal brain damage.
PROJECT 17 fits into the victim's genre of mental institution narratives, best known through books like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, THE BELL JAR and GIRL, INTERRUPTED. The main "victim" in the book is Christine, a 17-year-old foster child who has been sent to Danvers for an unspecified mental illness. The classmates piece together her story with the help of a journal they discover in an old mattress and with the clues she left behind. It is notable that Christine is a female and a foster child. Disempowered, unwanted people were the most likely to be checked into institutions at the first sign of behavioral disorders. Later, one of the characters reveals that her own grandmother was warehoused at Danvers for her severe alcoholism.
Although mental institutions have come to be viewed as sadistic prisons in which many innocent people have been caught and experimented upon, the institutional system emerged as a result of the work of the great social reformer Dorothea Dix. Horrified by the treatment of the insane, who were often housed in prisons or basements, beaten and starved, Dix wrote about their plight and petitioned Congress to consider new methods of care and treatment. Much of the 19th and 20th century treatments of the mentally ill is the result of her work.
Since then, amazing progress has been made in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. While there are still operational institutions, a lot of the disorders that would've once landed people in institutions are now treated with medicines, much gentler and more effective than the sedatives once used to control patients. But the pervasive horror and fascination with mental institutions and the care and treatment of the mentally ill stem from the fact that we still know so little about the human mind. What treatments used today will seem as barbaric and criminal as the trans-orbital lobotomy? Which of us, given a different time or situation, would have been locked behind the institution doors?
PROJECT 17 touches on all these issues, but it is primarily a spooky read narrated in the voices of each of the different characters. It blends the supernatural adventure of Stolarz's BLUE IS FOR NIGHTMARES COLLECTION with the poignant realism of BLEED. It is of particular interest to anyone interested in Danvers State Hospital or the history of mental institutions in the United States.
--- Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
" . . . a scream rips through my walkie-talkie . . . ", January 10, 2010
This review is from: Project 17 (Paperback)
I have a number of Stolarz' novels around here someplace, but have never got around to reading them, but, while browsing on Amazon I saw that she had a new novel out, and while looking at its product description I thought that it looked very interesting, and I made a rare impulse buy. As I liked haunted house stories, I looked forward to receiving and reading it. I was to be disappointed however, that this novel is published by a Disney subsidiary should have been a clue, one that I blithely ignored to my regret.
"Project 17" starts out with trying-to-reform loser Derik seeing that making a short film for a local news program might be his one shot at getting out of what he sees as a dead-end future of working for and being a future owner of his parents family style restaurant. His idea for his short film is to do some sort reality based project, based on the soon to be demolished Danvers State Hospital, a sanitarium high atop Hawthorne Hill, which has been long rumored to be haunted, and once was the home of the state's sadistically treated inmates, many of whom died while suffering through their cruel and inhuman psychiatric treatments. Derik plans on using some of his freelance commercial filmmaker Uncle's film equipment, and five of his fellow high school acquaintances, deliberately freezing out his friends whom he fears wouldn't take his project seriously, to make his film.
To do this Derik and his crew/actors have to sneak into the sanitarium at night while avoiding the guards. "Project 17" then begins to ping-pong between six separate characters; Derik the desperate filmmaker, Mimi the goth girl, Greta the ambitious wannabee actress, Tony, her boyfriend, Liza, the overachiever hoping to pad her résumé, and Chet, class clown and abused child. As the ping-ponging occurs, each character begins to reveal his or her own agenda and their hopes what this short film will do for them, from Chet's wanting to escape his drunken father to Greta hoping for a kick-start to her career. The potentially best character though is the misunderstood Mimi, who is more interested in forging her own identity, and who is going to Danvers State to find out some information about her own haunted and lost past.
The good stuff in this novel is that Stolarz has the talent to potentially create some potentially interesting characters. Unfortunately she undercuts her character building by devoting micro-short chapters to each character on a constant and revolving basis, which means unfortunately just as we start to get into a character's head, Stolarz undercuts her own efforts by then quickly switching to another character. The end result of all of this is that by switching from one character to another on a constant basis, none of Stolarz' characters ever get as developed as they could have been. Especially tragic is the character of Mimi, who has the most interesting backstory in the novel to tell. Unfortunately, her character seems constantly inconsistent as she seems moody and sympathetic in the first person, but something of a jokester and airhead latter on in as seen through other character's eyes.
Stolarz is also good at build atmosphere. Danvers State is certainly a creepy place, and Stolarz does a good job at portraying this, but after a hundred or so pages of atmosphere it becomes obvious that she is going to do very little with it. Yes, Danvers State is haunted, and only Mimi seems to really be in tune with the ghost, but other than portraying the sanitarium's creepy atmosphere, the occasional quick glimpse of something in the shadows, and the odd whisper in the dark, the whole ghost thing begins to seem like a lot of wasted effort.
It's quite clear that this novel is way too long for the underdeveloped story that Stolarz spins, and "Project 17" would have worked better if it were a hundred or more pages shorter, and the first-person multi-perspective view done away with. It may be that writing a novel for a Disney media-spinoff has caused Stolarz not to be able to take this haunted house novel to the next level that a novel like this should have been taken. It's also obvious that "Project 17" would have worked better as a movie where the atmosphere that she creates would have worked better, in fact, if anything, "Project 17" more often than not reads like a novelization of a movie or a failed movie project.
Stolarz also saddles the novel with two separate endings. The first that wraps up the ghost story, which in and of itself is particularly poignant, even if Stolarz doesn't do a particularly good job in telling it, and we do learn the meaning of the term Project 17. The second ending is a way too long and totally unnecessarily "and this is what happened to all of the characters after their night at Hawthorn House" type of thing, all of which can be skipped by the reader.
"Project 17" has promise, the initial mystery and ending are worthwhile, but they are too little and too late to really save this too long, too fragmented, and too bland ghost story. I hope that the previous books that I have purchased by her are better than this.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AMAZING SUPERNATURAL BOOK, January 2, 2008
This Author has once again outdone herself. Project 17 is an amazing book that doesnt suffer from the boring Cliche of many supernatural movies that share the same theme.
The story starts out with the character of Derik, a teen with a reputation as a heartbreaker, who is intrigued by the old saniterium in his town. Its rumors to be haunted prompt him to spend one night in the place before it gets town down. His hopes are to win a video contest so that he might persue a career in video instead of being stuck to his parents resturant. With the help of some classmates, the six teens sneak in one night armed with a video camera and the dream of catching a ghost on film. Little do they know what they are dealing with
I loved this story for one main reason. And that is the fact that its not full of sex and gore like most of these stories. All these kids are basically good and dont go in on a dare or for a party. They go simply to make a film. Theres no gore either, its more of suspense, knowing theres a ghost and seeing it lead up to all the ghostly encounters. This book has exceeded all my expectations and everyone who likes the paranormal and a little romance should read this.
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