The Worst Books I've Ever Read Part III

No, this is not a character from Shutter Island. This is someone who was forced to read Shutter Island. First he lost his hair, then he lost his mind.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

As I mentioned a few months ago, this has been made into a movie by Martin Scorsese. But not even that fact could alter my opinion of Shutter Island.
Frankly, nothing could alter my opinion of Shutter Island. If I was subjected to aversive conditioning so that every book other than Shutter Island made me vomit on sight, I still wouldn't reread it. And if someone forced me to watch the movie with those Clockwork Orange eye clamps, I would try my hardest to astrally project myself out of the theatre.

It's not that this starts out as a bad book. Not at all, in fact. It begins as a very gripping noir thriller, part psychological drama and part classic detective story. Two U.S. Marshals set out to a remote island that houses the criminally insane, in search of an inmate who mysteriously vanished from her cell. The story delves into the roots of violence, the individual and collective trauma caused by WWII, and barbaric aspects of the U.S. penal system. But twenty pages from the end, I started to wonder how on earth Lehane was going to wrap up all the disparate threads he'd been tossing out. "Is this actually going anywhere?" I wondered.

Then it went somewhere. Somewhere retarded.

Beware.