BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder by Michael Bartos; Suspenseful Satire Flies Close to the Cuckoo’s Nest but Falls Flat

 

BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder by Michael Bartos; Suspenseful Satire Flies Close to the Cuckoo’s Nest but Falls Flat

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: For someone to be placed in a mental hospital, they would have to be considered a potential harm to themselves and others. For someone to want to be put in there, they would have to be even more mentally ill, an investigative reporter looking for a story, or both. Ashley Roper, one of the protagonists of Michael Bartos’ novel BASH: Love, Madness, and Murder is both and he has a story to investigate.

The Blakemore Anderson State Hospital (BASH) is the site of several controversies. Accused murderer, Burton Peale escaped from there. Another, Tyler Goode languished there. There are reports of drugs being unwisely distributed and potential mistreatment. It's not a pleasant place to be sent to but it is a potential story so Ashley, a reporter for the lifestyle newspaper, Charley Town, decides to investigate it. He will impersonate a patient there and find out what's going on. Unfortunately, he finds getting admitted is the easy part. It's surviving and getting out of this environment that's the hard part.

BASH is kind of a mixed bag with some parts that work and others that don't. Some subplots get introduced and threaten to turn the book into something else but peter out before they pose any real effect on the narrative. Burton Peale’s escape promises to be thrilling but most of the points produce very little suspense and are only recalled after the fact. 

There are hints of abuse and corruption from the upper levels but the results aren't shown in a way that shows any after effects towards the patients. Maybe, in a drive to be satiric, Bartos ignored the human interest element that in such an environment people would be suffering, people who are often unable to function in the outside world and are at the mercy of their caregivers.

The plot that works the best is Ashley's. He is someone who is looking for a good story. He gained prominence because of his first person articles detailing his service in Afghanistan. This article could give him some more relevance and bring some much needed publicity to Charley Town, which with the exception of Ashley's military themed articles, has a reputation of being mostly local news and light fluff.

There is some humor and suspense with the process in which Ashley gets himself committed and the lengths that his girlfriend and friends have to use to get him released. It almost gives a gaslighting quality towards the possibility that Ashley's investigation could have gotten him committed for the rest of his life, even having doubts whether he imagined the circumstances that brought him there and slipping into the insanity that he feigned.

It would have been much more interesting if BASH was written as a terrifying place that deserves to be exposed so we would be much more concerned about Ashley's time there but the potential activities are more subverted and less upfront. It mutes the trouble that Ashley has gotten into for trying to expose the corruption but does show his determination in trying to reveal it.

BASH could be a better book but it needs to have more care in putting the ideas together to make a decent work.