Review: The Patient by Jasper DeWitt

I did not like this book. I am not typically a person who gets to the review stage of a book I didn't like to this extent, but I listened to the audiobook, and it was only slightly over four hours, and it was recommended to me by a book recommendation service. Otherwise, there is no way I would have gone past 25%. So if you love this book, I would suggest stopping reading if you don't want to read my very oppositional feelings.

I will also briefly talk about the book recommendation service I used. I will write something about my experience once I have read all three, but this book fits squarely in the only thing I asked not to get. That thing was a novel (so nonfiction is fine) published after the author gains popularity on the internet. I didn't know this book fit into that until I finished and googled the author, but I then thought that was hilarious because it was literally my only hard no. On to the book.

The Patient follows Dr. Parker H, a psychologist fresh out of school, as he starts working at a mental health inpatient facility where a mysterious patient named Joe drives all his care team mad or to suicide. The novel is told as a series of posts on a defunct medical forum. I really should not have read the book, this doesn't inherently sound like something I would hate, but I am not sure I would have picked it up independently. I did go into the book with an open mind; I was ready to be into the book; I just wasn't.

Clearly, I didn't enjoy this book, normally I would include things I liked around here, but I am not sure I have them. Aside from the book’s end with a little line about listening to kids, which I guess is fine. Now on to what I didn't like.

I didn't like the narrator, this is not something I normally require to like a book, but I think the things I disliked about the narrator were not meant to be negative aspects of his personality. I found myself literally saying "yikes" out loud at multiple points in the narration. One of the first interactions this mental health professional has with another person begins by declaring he is about to commit suicide, then explaining he is not actually going to kill himself, it is just a metaphor because he wants to do something dumb. I just thought that was annoying, and pairing that with how mental health stuff is presented in this novel; I just wasn't overall impressed. He is just so painfully a hero, while also doing things I found morally not congruent with his opinion of his actions (and I think the book’s opinion of his actions) that I could not do anything but hate him.

I was not ever scared or really even curious. I felt no tension in the question of if the book was going to be supernatural or not, and I felt no satisfaction at the reveal. It was very obvious from the beginning it was, and I was just annoyed that tens of people before Parker studied this case, and Parker figures it out pretty quickly. Apparently, our special genius narrator was the only one who could actually figure it out. I hope my eye roll comes through. You read thrillers/mysteries/horror/weird speculative stuff to feel surprise and tension; this book did not do that for me.

I hated the portrayal of women. There are five women of any importance in this story; they are all maternal and compassionate, even the straight-laced, no-nonsense woman, her flaw in dealing with Joe is that she felt maternal towards him. Parker's mother exists in the narrative to be tortured and fridged to give Parker motivation. The kind nurse is fridged to get the plot rolling. Joe's mother commits suicide, and I thought her deep love for her kid, paired with never visiting, was unbelievable. My least favorite way a woman was written was Parker's girlfriend, Jocelyn. She is initially presented as a rich girl getting her Ph.D. in literature (or something we are maybe meant to see as frivolous) who is just a wonderful, compassionate angel. She is brutally assaulted at the end of the book, where she abandons her studies, moves far from all family and friends, becomes a recluse, and declares that all she needs to be happy is Parker. And her PSYCHOLOGIST boyfriend does not at all see the problem with this. Also, right after she says all she needs is him, he says he is still deeply driven to help the world. So glad this dude is still gonna be a big strong hero while his lady needs nothing but his love. My favorite.

There are more things about this book that I didn't like, but it seems like beating a dead horse to list all of them; I would prefer to end it here and move on to reading a new book I will hopefully like more.

I gave this book 1 star on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I clearly don't recommend this book, but you do you.

Apparently, I am getting a not insignificant number of people coming to this post after searching for an explanation of the ending. To the best of my memory, in the end, the monster has been released into the open. He is among the general population. The terrible psychologist, after his lady love is assaulted to make the problem personal, is still on the lookout for Joe. I am sure with little self-aggrandizing hero hopes in his heart. Joe is able to find victims out in the real world that he could not when everyone believed him to be a ‘crazy person,’ character-I-hate would still like to thwart him.