Shock Treatment

by Winfred Van Atta

Genres: Fiction

190 pages

First published January 1, 1961

Reviews

[Diane Wachter · Rating 3 out of 5]

HB-B, Cottage, @ 1961, Read 4/22/21. Fiction, Mystery, Suspense. A young, out of work actor, gets talked into posing as a schizophrenic who is voluntarily admitted to a state mental hospital to watch the head Doctor who may or may not be involved in a crime. You know this will not go as well as they portrayed, it has lots of twists and turns, and I kept thinking the actor was an idiot, that I would never put myself into the position he did, but then, of course, there wouldn't have been a story! 3☆'s = Good.

[Bill Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Winfred Van Atta's SHOCK TREATMENT, filmed in 1964. The movie and book plots couldn't be more different and the movie did a good job of rescuing the ending of the book. For 90% of the story, Van Atta's book sailed along, twists and turns all over the place, ex-Nazi doctor seeming to have our hero permanently up a tree, then all of a sudden ... a resolution that is seemingly totally arbitrary, as if the author said to someone, "here finish this: do that to this one and this to that one and then I'll do 20 pages of summation and we'll call it a book." I could have eaten walls and spit bricks, as the poet once said. Some fine writing ultimately wasted.