Shutter Island

When the previews for Shutter Island first started coming out, I knew it was a movie that was instantly going to land on my must-see list.  But try as I might, I couldn't convince Dean to go see it with me, and because I dragged my feet and waited too long, before I knew it the movie was gone from the theatres.  So I did what I probably should have done in the first place: I read the book. 

If I didn't actually have to go to work in the morning I probably could have finished this book in a couple sittings.  And not because the length is super short, but because the book is so good and so suspenseful that it's hard to find a good place to stop.  Let me quickly set the scene.  The year is 1954 and Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have been sent to Ashcliffe Hospital to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates.  While the two are working their way through a seemingly impossible case, a massive storm hits the island and Teddy and Chuck are separated.  Fearing that he has been fed psychotropic drugs and convinced that radical brain surgery is taking place somewhere on the island, Teddy tries to hold on to his sanity when it seems like everyone else around him has lost theirs.

I'm not going to be able to reveal too many details, because I don't want to reveal too much about the book's ending.  I will say that I have been waiting to read a book like this for a long time.  I'm a sucker for the mystery genre, and an even bigger sucker for a few good plot twists and a surprise ending.  This book delivered all that and more.  The character development throughout was done very subtley with conversations between the characters, and also plenty of inner-thought monologue from Teddy.  I found the characters to be instantly likeable, and pleasant enough to follow for 200 pages or so.  

My one gripe is hardly a gripe at all, just something minor that caught me off guard.  The book ends very suddenly.  It's almost like the author was in the middle of building up another scene, and then just decided enough was enough.  Don't get me wrong, the ending works, but I wasn't quite ready for it when it happened.  Plus this is one of those books that has a preview section at the end with sample pages from the author's next book, so I wasn't prepared to reach a conclusion when I still had pages left to turn.  It's a mental thing..... 

This just goes to prove my point that any movie which started out as a book should always be enjoyed in its natural form, in other words don't be lazy.....read the book.  The movies are usually still enjoyable, and sometimes you get lucky and will stumble across a great adaptation, but the book is still where the real magic happens.  That being said, I cannot fairly compare the movie and book version of Shutter Island because I have not yet seen the movie, but I'm glad I got to experience the written form of the story first.  So maybe everything does happen for a reason.