The Fever Cabinet

Book excerpt: “[The Fever Cabinet] succeeds in turning an unusual historical artifact into a source of supernatural terror. Fans of historical horror should check this out.” —Publishers Weekly It’s the autumn of 1940 and Roland Hellmich has lost everything: his job, his friends, his home—perhaps even his mind. A German immigrant to Canada at the outbreak of World War II, Roland finds distrust and contempt at every turn. When the hallucinations that seize him with growing frequency cause a minor traffic disturbance, it’s enough for a judge to commit him to the Erasmus Walpole Institution for Mental Hygiene. In the asylum, Roland befriends a sympathetic young nurse named Martha Donnelly. But even her friendship can’t weigh against sadistic orderlies, dismissive doctors, and a punishing treatment called the Fever Cabinet—a coffin of wood and steel designed to induce fevers as a treatment for madness. Instead, the claustrophobic cabinet sends Roland on a voyage to a nightmarish underworld, one that seems much more than a hallucination. Though he begs to be spared further treatment, his doctors see his pleas as mere manifestations of his illness, and refuse. But when Roland begins waking from his sessions in the cabinet with knowledge that he cannot by any rational means possess, even the skeptical Martha begins to wonder whether his visions amount to something more than the misfires of an unwell mind. For there’s no question that something bad slumbers beneath the asylum’s surface: a string of patients have gone missing or died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors swirl about the asylum’s enigmatic founder. Together, Roland and Martha must unearth secrets long buried, and face an evil that, dormant for centuries, has finally begun to stir.