check out website: www.booksattransworld.co.uk

This is a companion volume and prequel to the TV series 'Kingdom Hospital', which aired on TV in 2004. 'Kingdom Hospital' was developed by Stephen King, taking inspiration from the Danish mini-series, 'Riget' by Lars Von Trier. I watched the first few episodes of the series, but eventually found it too slow-moving to hold my interest: I'm all for the slow building of suspense but 'Kingdom Hospital' had me yawning. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read...



Sally Druse, the Eleanor of the title, was a likeable character in the series. A sprightly and youthful elderly spiritualist whose son worked at the hospital. She herself visited the old and dying there, comforting them in their last days, and it was while performing such acts of kindness that she first heard the child crying. Except that there was no child, at least in the present. In the TV series, we got to see the child - the spirit, rather, the child was a ghost. The book tells the child's tragic story and details her interactions with Sally.

It's not a bad story and the style is interesting. Precise in places (Sally is a trained psychologist), florid in others (she's also psychic), it could be the writing of a seventy-five-year-old spiritualist who may or may not be suffering from a variety of mental disorders - including hallucinations. Her descriptions of the people she meets are rather fun, gently mischievous or disquieting depending on the person. She's an attractive character, very self-willed and surprisingly self-analytical for a self-confessed psychic. My apologies for the overuse of 'self', but after all it's written in the first person...

There's a competent build-up of suspense, too, and some evocative descriptions of out-of-body experiences (which she treats with a delightful pragmatism). However, unfortunately I found the ending disappointingly anti-climactic. Nasty, yes, but not as nasty as I'd been anticipating. Of course, that may say more about what it takes to shock or impress me than how effective the conclusion actually is...

There's a competent build-up of suspense, too, and some evocative descriptions of out-of-body experiences which she treats with a delightful pragmatism. However, unfortunately I found the ending disappointingly anti-climactic. Nasty, yes, but not as nasty as I'd been anticipating. Of course, that may say more about what it takes to shock or impress me than how effective the conclusion actually is...

Then again, this is Eleanor's story and prefigures the TV series, so perhaps it had to be written this way so as to not give away too much of the plot. Not having seen all of the series I can't really tell. On the whole, though, it's a diverting read. Just don't expect too much of the ending.

Joules Taylor
http://www.wordwrights.co.uk