What do you think?
Rate this book
The White Protocol
“The White Protocol is an ambivalently supernatural and psychological medical thriller, set in a huge, ugly, rambling hospital, in the heart of a vicious city, in a dystopia called the USA. I conceive of the book as something of a long, dark, epic symphony, or perhaps rather like a brutal succession of storms abutted by lachrymose stillness. The White Protocol is a long, bleak and very, very strange journey that I am confident a good many of you will enjoy, the perfect accompaniment to urban anxieties in the short, desolate days of the dark season.” — Avalon Brantley as Lockett Hollis
582 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2024
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 8, 2025
A sprawling, horrifying nightmare that blends supernatural terrors (or are they?) with those that are all too human, the majority of which takes place inside a vast, labyrinthine hospital where secret drug experiments relating to dementia research are happening in the grungy sub-basement. Are all the murders and shadowy demonic entities the staff and patients are experiencing/hallucinating somehow connected to the experiments?
Part medical thriller, part weird psychological horror, with a plethora of fully realized, sympathetic characters that made this hallucinatory hospital of horrors all the scarier, as I wanted them to survive. Well, some of them, anyway. At over 500 pages you’d think there’d be a lot of padding, but even the various info dumps on medical procedures, MRIs, Alzheimer’s, etc. were interesting. You can tell that the late Avalon Brantley knew her stuff when it came to working in a hospital, whether through personal experience or extensive research.
There were only a couple slight negatives for me: 1. A chapter featuring black jive talk that rang false to the extent that I briefly wished I was dead, and 2. A sex scene so overwrought with sticky detail that I wished I’d always been dead (must be some remnants of the Catholic in me that’ll likely never go away). And yet, the rest of the novel was so creepy and absorbing I can’t not go with a full 5 star rating here.
I shall now commence reading everything Avalon Brantley has ever written. Too bad her work is next to impossible to come across on the cheap.
A bizarre, disturbing, epic gem.
Part medical thriller, part weird psychological horror, with a plethora of fully realized, sympathetic characters that made this hallucinatory hospital of horrors all the scarier, as I wanted them to survive. Well, some of them, anyway. At over 500 pages you’d think there’d be a lot of padding, but even the various info dumps on medical procedures, MRIs, Alzheimer’s, etc. were interesting. You can tell that the late Avalon Brantley knew her stuff when it came to working in a hospital, whether through personal experience or extensive research.
There were only a couple slight negatives for me: 1. A chapter featuring black jive talk that rang false to the extent that I briefly wished I was dead, and 2. A sex scene so overwrought with sticky detail that I wished I’d always been dead (must be some remnants of the Catholic in me that’ll likely never go away). And yet, the rest of the novel was so creepy and absorbing I can’t not go with a full 5 star rating here.
I shall now commence reading everything Avalon Brantley has ever written. Too bad her work is next to impossible to come across on the cheap.
A bizarre, disturbing, epic gem.
Displaying 1 of 1 review