The White Protocol

by Lockett Hollis

We are beginning to see the end of the world.

But Sammie can see more than most . . .

Mere months after the successive deaths of her mother and younger brother, and with her father scarcely able to retain the house in which she was raised, Sammie finds herself alone in a vicious city, having landed a job at a gaunt and gigantic teaching hospital on the eastern side of the desolate metropolis, where she hopes to earn enough to help her father keep their home.

At the hospital, encompassed by illness, pain, violence and death, having found herself physically incapable of releasing the grief she carries for her lost loved ones, Sammie begins to see nefarious, nebulous entities which no other persons seem able to see, and which seem to her not only to have manifested from—but indeed to be feeding upon—the ever-expanding banquet of human misery.

And now these scavengers seem all the further allured by the unpurged agony Sammie has stoppered inside of herself.

Down in the bowels of the hospital subbasement, Dr. Eli Anani has developed a miraculous cure for Alzheimer's. But his treatment requires further testing, including MRI examinations of human subjects, performed under the guidance of imaging guru Marc Marini, who befriends and entices young Sammie to take part in their ground-breaking research.

But as the already brutal city grows worse with the world, until it seems everything everywhere is descending into irremediable chaos, Sammie discovers herself deep in a world of deception, drug trafficking, and terrifying forces that are beyond and yet beholden to humanity’s suffering, and to its own inhumanity. There is a madness spreading. What begins as a hope for healing memories concludes in unforgettable cataclysm as the forces awakened by the minds in the magnet turn their ravenous attentions to the wider world, to propagate turmoil in an insidious celebration of torment and terror.

Likely to be one of the most bleak and frightening books you will ever read, ambivalently supernatural and psychological, The White Protocol will pull you into a place where only two things are death and madness; and there it will leave you, far more disturbed by what you don't see than that which you do.

Genres: Horror

506 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 20, 2013

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Full review: 1/22/24)
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 aka Lockett Hollis* 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. Also, how does this only have one rating?

A bizarre, disturbing, epic gem.

*It used to be thought that Lockett Hollis was an occasional writing partner of the mysterious Brantley, but since the latter’s untimely passing in 2017 it has come out that they were in fact one and the same.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

I'd like to keep reading but can't get past writing like this:

“That’s fine,” responded the man with a thick voice the color of tobacco juice.

and:

She turned, a chill splashing her like a shower turned on a waiting body, the water not given time to grow warm.