Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can-until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial.
The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital.
Unsure of what’s real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview’s halls.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Imprint: St Martins US
Publication date: 27/10/2025
The Graceview Patient
By Caitlin Starling
Review by Mida
I forgot how much I love a good, solid horror but this book did a great job of reminding me. With visceral descriptions of body horror and tension that ramps up chapter by chapter, this is something to devour. Margaret starts hesitant but hopeful, but the longer she spends in the too-clean ward with the overly kind nurses who refuse to give a straight answer, the more she suspects something is very, very wrong.
Starling’s prose dances between poetry and splatter film, with dreamlike sequences of hallucinations that blur the borders of reality before slamming Margaret back to ponder the helplessness of her situation from her hospital bed. An integral part of the horror is the isolation of chronic illness - along with the real fear that the solution she is being fed might make things worse, rather than better- as layers of bureaucracy keep her trapped in her room.
Warning to those with a queasy stomach; this is not a book to read while eating. For fans of Family Business by Jonathan Sims or the reader in search of a horror that leaves them wanting to take a long shower.
