The Ward (2) (Downside)

Having read the first book that is actually set in this warped world "The Mall", I very much enjoyed this book. You don't have to read "The Mall" to enjoy this novel, but it does have some overlapping elements in it. S.L. Grey is of course a writing team of two South African writers, and I must say they are able to write together seamlessly so you never notice which one is doing their turn.This world within our regular world is filled with extremely strange people and things, and once you are immersed in it you will enjoy it without a doubt. I recommend this highly for anyone looking for something different with some very, very nice horrific elements in it. Do yourself a favor and check into "The Ward" and if you enjoy it like I did, check out their first novel "The Mall" as well.

This book I did certainly not enjoy, very weird. I'm not sure why any author would write this kind of stuff. Definitely would not recommend it to anyone.

11/2 - I'm already getting a disturbing feeling from the idea of this hospital. Full of gruesome patients, nurses who could care less and might kill you if you annoy them and the underlying feeling that something evil is going to happen to you at any moment - just my kind of horror hospital story. To be continued...12/2 - This would be a great horror movie. It's definitely creeping me out as a horror book. The idea of a disgusting hospital where you go in for a procedure or an emergency and something goes wrong and you end up as an unwilling body part donor to the rich and famous is not a rational fear, but it's hidden deep down at the bottom of my psyche - enough that anything featuring this kind of storyline is quite disturbing. The whole situation really plays into my fears of what can happen while you're under anaesthetic and unaware of what the doctors are doing. South Africa is a perfect setting for this kind of hospital, I think it would be less believable in a city the world sees as more modern and civilised like New York or London or Sydney. I wouldn't be able to suspend my disbelief at the idea of a hospital like this hidden away in a back alley that the media, if not the government, had exposed and closed down. To be continued...SPOILER ALERT14/2 - I was surprised by the revelation that aliens were the bad guys as opposed to humans with evil intent or ghosts (sort of House on Haunted Hill style). I was surprised when Lisa and Farrell managed to escape the hospital and there was still 100 or so pages of the book left to go. I expected the final climax of the book to be one escaping and not the other, and so the ending was different to the usual horror-have-to-escape-book/movie that you see in the average storyline. Other reviewers have said that this wasn't quite as good as the author's first book, so since I'm giving The Ward 4 stars, I'm really looking forward to reading their previous book - I'm expecting big things from it now.

This book reminded me a lot of the Christopher Pike books I used to read as a teenager. The ending is okay, but nothing is explained. What makes this story a win for me though, is that it is so freakishly macabre and mind boggling, I couldn’t put it down until I finished it! The characters are nothing to write home about, but in the grand scheme of things they didn’t really matter. What mattered was what was going on in the levels beneath the hospital. Even now, I still don’t know what the heck was going on, which, in some ways made it an unsatisfactory read for me. But the plot itself is interesting and horrific enough to keep you reading.

I liked this book because I like disturbing stories. The Ward could have been written by Bentley Little.... it is that type of horror. It is quite unpredictable and has several plot twists. It is not going to raise the readers IQ, but if you like your horror on the funny side but still twisted, this is an entertaining tale.

The Mall didn't scare me. I enjoyed it, but it didn't get me with the same visceral kick to the guts The Ward did. This time round writing partners Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg (the two halves of SL Grey) hit their stride and deliver an overall tighter novel. And, as always, they make me care what happens to two unlikeable characters. Granted, I admit to wanting something really bad to happen to one.Lisa is a basket case with major self-esteem issues which has led her to attempt to commit suicide in the past. Her body dismorphic disorder means she is never satisfied with her appearance, and will go to great lengths to obtain what she considers the perfect body even if it means having surgery in the worst of the government hospitals. In that sense, she makes a perfect candidate for the Modification Ward.Farrell shares Lisa's obsession with outward appearance, though he projects it on to others. His chosen career as fashion photographer pretty much sums up the type of personality one can expect. Shallow and self-centred, he is also a control freak, so when he ends up severely ill, blind and at the mercy of heartless medical practitioners in the New Hope hospital (the distillation of everything that is wrong with government-funded South African health care), readers can only expect things to get worse.What lies in wait beyond New Hope exists as a dark parody of the medical system, a world where patients are either donors or clients, and medical staff scuttle about like worker ants in a diabolical hive presided over by the scalpel-happy butchers. In a big way The Ward is about people getting their just deserts. Anyone who's dipped into Clive Barker's cenobite-populated Hellraiser universe will resonate with the goings on downside as Grey terms it. If you've ever had a horrific experience in hospital, it is echoed within the pages of The Ward, offering readers an inevitable downward spiral. Consider yourself duly warned.

Great book in good condition. Arrived on time and was a fast read. If you like horror, you will love Bentley Little. He can make the most normal things seem creepy.

I highly recommend this book, even if you aren't South African. The two lead characters tell their stories in first person and this gives the reader the feeling of being right there, in the confusion. Could not put it down.

This is one of my favorite series so I run long. I couldn't help myself, there was so much I wanted to pack in.It is both the beauty and curse of the horror genre that it can take so many forms. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is horror and taught (in my day) in high school English classes. It also might be my first twist ending. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is the ghost story kind of horror. Literary horror, but horror nonetheless. It also gave us the "creepy kid"* theme which has become a horror trope. At the other end of the horror spectrum is a book I recently reviewed, Roger Smith's (writing as Max Wilde)  Vile Blood , an exploration of evil and heavy on gore.I'm going to use the terms upside and downside in this review. Upside is our world. Downside is the shadow world.The Ward follows the authors' first book,  The Mall . The Ward is set in a poor public hospital in Johannesburg and not long after the events of The Mall. There are several small crossovers between the two books and I recommend reading The Mall first. It takes place in that ubiquitous temple of communal worship dedicated to all things commercial, the urban mall. What they do with it is both humorous and horrifying.The story is told from alternating first person, male and a female viewpoints. Josh Farrell is a pretentious, self-absorbed fashion photographer. Lisa Cassavetes suffers from a severe case of body dysmorphic disorder.Josh returns to consciousness after two days, blind, in New Hope hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. He learns that he collapsed at work with a severe case of measles. Almost a greater shock than his medical condition is where he is. His medical aid should have him in a first rate hospital, not No Hope as it is popularly called. Lisa is on the same ward. Unable to get any more plastic surgery in Durban, Lisa has conned her way into New Hope in her search for physical perfection. Both are in New Hope for reasons out of their control and when they find themselves in the downside Wards, the horror begins.The first third takes place in New Hope/No Hope hospital and it paints a grim picture of public healthcare. Lack of cleanliness, bad attitudes, and scarcity of health-care staff have figured into reports on the state of public hospitals in South Africa this year. It is no wonder that the authors have Josh horrified to learn that he is in a public hospital instead of the private facilities his medical aide should be paying for. The downside wards demonstrate a different view of health care. Let's just say that it's commodity based.With The Mall and now The Ward, S.L. Grey (Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg) are exploring a form of horror somewhere between Jackson/James and Smith mentioned above. Because I'm a librarian and think in categories, I decided the books dealt with horror of the variety perversion of the familiar or the perversion of safe places.I asked the authors how they see their books. Sarah said she would "nick China Miéville's term 'weird fiction' as a category for the Downside books, as I'm not sure they fit fit under the 'horror' umbrella completely or what the term really means any more." 'Weird fiction' is a good description for their books. Wikipedia has an article on it, naturally. If you do a search on china mieville weird fiction I think you'll agree with Sarah.Louis confirmed that I was on the right track:We did deliberately set out to take everyday (and often boring, mundane) reality like shopping malls and add a frightening twist to it...If something looks just about real, but there's just something off about it, we both think that's more frightening than something completely fantastic....We wanted to put real, everyday people in weird situations and really try to ge our reders to imagine how they'd react if that implausible stuff were really happening to them. The Mall and The Ward are set in places that represent pleasure, comfort, and safety, and use those locations also to examine political and social issues while at the same time giving the reader a cracking good read and scare. The Mall It takes place in that ubiquitous temple of communal worship dedicated to all things commercial, the urban mall. What they do with it is both humorous and horrifying. The Ward focuses on health care, with disparity in care as a subtext and does it in a darker and, I think, more cynical way. Louis said that they "deliberately set out to satirise certain injustices that are ripe for satirising in society. They seemed a good background for our novels, but it's the characters and situations that are in the foreground. The books are primarily for fun.""The Ward advances our knowledge of the downside world and we see more of the Administration, those who run downside. I think the authors had a bit of fun creating a new bizarro-world bureaucracy. We also learn that downside interacts with the upside more than we expected from events in The Mall.The Ward and The Mall are a fun, intelligent, read with a good blend of character, setting, humour, satire, and social commentary. They have a flavour of South Africa which adds a little spice for non-South Africans and probably gives the South African readers an "oh yea, I've been there" feeling. I love the "secret world" trope and the Downside series is one of the best. The third volume is in the works and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what aspect of Downside will be explored next.*I borrowed this from shmoop.com. They have a nice 4 paragraph "in a nutshell" essay on The Turn of the Screw. Vile BloodThe Mall

Saw this in the 'New Paperbacks' section of the Observer Review, so was hoping for a well-written, character-driven, hospital-set psychological thriller.What I got instead was a dumb, unoriginal novel that seemed made for the generation of punters that have grown up with series like 'Lost' and simply don't care if anything makes sense. Josh Farrell, a cardboard cut-out fashion photographer, narcissistic, heartless, with a supermodel girlfriend and John Terry's vocabulary, wakes to find himself mostly blind (as per Rupert Thomson's 'The Insult') and lying in Johannesburg's run-down, state-run New Hope hospital. He has, of course, lost his memory of what happened to him (as per about a billion similar novels and films. Here for example is the synopsis of John Carpenter's film, also called 'The Ward'. 'Kristen (Amber Heard), a beautiful but troubled young woman, finds herself bruised, cut, drugged, and held against her will in a remote ward of a psychiatric hospital. She is completely disoriented, with no idea why she was brought to this place and no memory of her life before being admitted. All she knows is that she isn't safe.').Anyway.Farrell meets Lisa, a twenty-something body-dysmorphic, who is in the hospital for yet more unnecessary plastic surgery.The hospital being a gore-caked, weirdy place full of drooling orderlies and tyrannical nurses and stinky-breathed, lumpy-headed men who follow you into the showers and write the word 'RUN' on the wall ( in fact, the descriptions of the place aren't bad), they come to the blindingly obvious - and repeatedly stated - conclusions that 'something is seriously wrong' and that they 'have to get out'.Cue a lot of running about the hospital, shouting Compu-Thriller dialogue like 'Let's go! and 'I don't have all the answers!' and 'Wait!' and 'We have to go!' and 'We have to try, Farrell!' and 'Get your hands off me!' and 'What do you mean?' and 'oh thank God!' and 'Come on!' and 'Listen!' and 'Look!' and 'Lisa!' and 'Farrell!'Lisa! and Farrell! walk into 'another' world underneath the hospital (deafening echoes of David Lynch, Murakami, Lars von Trier's series, 'Kingdom') populated by cartoonish, strangely modified people with their own mangled language and who are engaged in nefarious activities (again see Michel Faber's 'Under the Skin' and Ishiguru's 'Never Let me Go' for clues). For some reason Lisa! and Farrell! don't seem to twig what's going on or that these people are 'not like them'. Perhaps it's because Grey is positing them as typically modern, unreflective, self-obsessed characters (which they are). More likely though, it 's because, as well as a hospital, they are stuck in a silly, contrived novel.The story doesn't really know where to go after that and just throws out developments for the sake of it. Mostly, doors burst open, hands shake, and Lisa! and Farrell! succumb to an odd illness which means they can't stop saying each other's names. There is no real tension. We never really discover the Underworlders' interest in Lisa, or what they themselves are, or why they are engaged in their activities. The editor, never over-active, seems to have lost interest just over half-way...talking about a patient who's had her face removed, Lisa informs us, 'She won't be able to face it!' A nurse 'wipes the dribble of blood that is dribbling out of her nose'.I guess Grey is (are?) trying for some kind of satire on vanity and the medical industry, but I couldn't tell you the point of it. Surely it would be better if the hospital was a really posh, private clinic, so at least we'd get some contrast and sense of the unexpected? We don't give a used swab for Lisa! or Farrell! (or anyone else) so any sense of jeopardy is hollow.Nurse, the screens please.

I've not written a book review since I had to do one as part of my O level Eng Lit course back in 1978, so please forgive me if I get the format wrong.I read this as my 1st Kindle book download: not sure what made me go for this 3 yrs ago, but I tend to like crime and thrillers so that may have been my motivation.Looking back to when I read this, I recall feeling an impending sense of dread coupled with a macabre fascination with the medical procedures being forced on the various characters.It felt a little '1984-esque' in terms of whether this was a vision of what could be.It also had the ability to make you believe that this really was the reality of life in the place you were now embroiled in: almost like a news report at times rather than a novel.I found it both fascinating re the medical detail (I kind of like the detailed medical stuff - makes it more believable and all the more scary) and scary: very much the what-if scenario.If you don't like lots of medical detail (scalpels, operations, cutting up bodies, that type of thing) then this isn't for you.Whilst the plot and storyline was good, I did feel the book fell down a lot on the quality of the writing and plot. It was thin on characters and a few times the plot seemed to get lost.That being said, it was still a strange sort of macabre world portrayed sufficiently well to scare the hell out of me!

I had previously read The Mall, written by the same writer. While The Mall was really slow to get going, this novel throws the characters in to peril quite early on.Both The Mall and The Ward are a dark observation and satire of the western culture, of obsession with shopping, trends and beauty, and the length people will go or how we're enslaved to it.The Ward concentrates on the beauty aspect, delving in to plastic surgery and the horrific price that people are willing to pay to achieve that perfect look. And what exactly is considered beautiful?I enjoyed this book, it created creepy and strange environments well, though nothing new if you're use to horror.But the monsters are quite unique, and they keep you reading on. They are what we could be if there were no limits or restraint.There are formatting issues but that doesn't bother me.Overall, it's an entertaining horror that makes you contemplate the western culture.