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A review by scaraquin
Henry Franks by Peter Adam Salomon
4.0
This is a bit like a modern-day Frankenstein story. Henry, the main character, has no memory of his life before a horrific accident that gave him the many scars that cross his body. Most of the book involves him trying to figure out his past, while dealing with strange dreams that don't seem to belong with him, and the growing understanding that his father isn't telling him the complete truth about his past. Also, there is also a new serial killer loose in the area, and Henry's father seems to be hiding what he knows about these events. The true story comes out near the end in one long narrative from Henry's father, right before he dies from a wound from this killer. Henry had been dying of cancer, and his slow death was driving his mother mad. She made his father - a great doctor - swear that he would save him, and yet nothing he did seemed to work. Finally, when Henry was about to die, his father took drastic measures. He took the body of a man who had just committed suicide, and transplanted Henry's head onto this healthy body. Since Henry wasn't waking up from this operation, however, his mother tried to commit suicide, and so his father was forced to do a similar procedure to her. The next problem was that Henry seemed to be rejecting this body transplant, and so parts of him kept dying. His father therefore had to keep adding new body parts as the limbs died (which explains Henry's many stitches). Both Henry and his mother finally woke up, but Henry had lost all of his memory, and his mother had gone completely insane. During the entire book, while Henry tried to understand his past, his father had been chasing down his mother (who had escaped) since he thought she was responsible for the serial killings (which she wasn't).
This was an interesting book. It borderlines on gruesome - which is unsurprising considering the subject - but it manages not to go too far. There is a constant reminder that Henry's scars are itching in the Georgia heat, and that he is slowly losing all sensation in his arms, and yet these details don't go out of their way to disturb you. This isn't necessarily a fast-pased novel, and yet there is definitely a continuously growing tension, which crescendos at the end with the arrival of a hurricane and and final revelation of the truth. Instead of being filled with suspense, this is a book filled with the constant sensation of dissonance, which is different enough from most books to make this one memorable.While the entire plot could be viewed as disturbing, what actually threw me the most was the epilogue, which fasts forward about a decade into the future. In it, Henry is on his deathbed (his body is still in the process of rejecting his transplant) and wife (who was his high school girlfriend, and who has obviously become a doctor in order to save his life) proposes to keep him alive through a second transplant. This would mean finding another "donor" body to replace his failed one with. If there is going to be a sequel to this story, it looks like we will be faced even more with the ethical dilemma of questioning how far you would go towards saving someone you love. Would you be willing to go so far as to kill in order to stay alive?
This was an interesting book. It borderlines on gruesome - which is unsurprising considering the subject - but it manages not to go too far. There is a constant reminder that Henry's scars are itching in the Georgia heat, and that he is slowly losing all sensation in his arms, and yet these details don't go out of their way to disturb you. This isn't necessarily a fast-pased novel, and yet there is definitely a continuously growing tension, which crescendos at the end with the arrival of a hurricane and and final revelation of the truth. Instead of being filled with suspense, this is a book filled with the constant sensation of dissonance, which is different enough from most books to make this one memorable.While the entire plot could be viewed as disturbing, what actually threw me the most was the epilogue, which fasts forward about a decade into the future. In it, Henry is on his deathbed (his body is still in the process of rejecting his transplant) and wife (who was his high school girlfriend, and who has obviously become a doctor in order to save his life) proposes to keep him alive through a second transplant. This would mean finding another "donor" body to replace his failed one with. If there is going to be a sequel to this story, it looks like we will be faced even more with the ethical dilemma of questioning how far you would go towards saving someone you love. Would you be willing to go so far as to kill in order to stay alive?