My original The Incurables audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Doctor Freeman is a pioneer in the field of psychiatric medicine in the early 1950’s, unfortunately it is for his work in lobotomizing homicidal patients. The hospital has decided the surgery is too dangerous and asks him to stop his work or leave the hospital. He chooses to leave. Distraught and depressed that his work will be lost to time, he forges out to share his work with the world.

In a parallel story, the town of Burnwood seems to be overcrowded with the evil and the insane. A preacher has declared his son to be the second coming of Christ, insisting that he can cure the ill and ultimately raise the dead. A teenage girl obsessed with her mother’s hidden treasure has turned to prostitution and murder until she can get the money and free herself from squalor and humiliation.

The characters collide in a world of insanity and depravity. There are glimmers of hope, but darkness pervades. They are all desperate to feel better about their downward spiraling lives, but continue doing the truly awful with predicable results.

The Incurables is a horror story about depraved people. The only redeemable character seems to be the preacher’s son, Durango, whose father has mostly destroyed any chance of happiness in his humiliating life.

It is an interesting premise, and generally entertaining, but the story fumbles in its believability. A doctor who can perform thousands of lobotomies on willing participants is a stretch at best. Everyone in the story is either purely evil or utterly heartless, giving them a two-dimensional feel.

Richard Rieman performs the story well. His voice is pleasant and his characters well defined. There is a folksy quality to his reading that lends well with the mid-20th Century setting. A good performance overall.

If you like your horror fiction dark and hopeless, this may be a good listen. There is an otherworldly feel to the story, that maybe someone will be saved by the supernatural. But darkness pervades and evil ultimately has its way.

Audiobook was provided for review by the narrator. ( )

***Review Copy***

So it took me forever to finish this book. I kept hoping that it would get better that there was something juicy that I was missing.Alas there wasn't , no big reveal no stunning revelation and absolutely no point to this story. An epic fail. ( )

Reading The Incurables is akin to being on the set of a wild west frontier town production movie possibly under the direction of one of the greatest directors of all times, John Ford and starring two of his favourite protagonists John Wayne and Victory McLaglen....”She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” comes to mind. Now if we add to this the language and character interplay in a Quentin Tarantino production such as Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta discussing the finer parts of a quarter pounder...”Do you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Paris? They call it Royale with cheese”....then perhaps you have some idea just how just how colourful and direct this character driven novel by Jon Bassoff is.

Doctor Walter Freeman offers hope to the ill and insane with his transorbitol lobotomy and he should know as he has performed over 3000 successful operations. When however he is sacked from his job at the hospital and he travels to the town of Burnwood “a debauchery-filled meatpacking town with plenty of history but not much future.” with his faithful companion Edgar (himself a recipient of transorbitol lobotomy) his patience and his faith in his ability will be sorely tested.

In this Oklahoma backwater he meets an assortment of odd, demented and violent cast of characters; Durango the next Messiah driven by his god fearing father Stanton...”Stanton had made prophecies before and none of them had come true. But Durango couldn’t help but believe, just a little bit. Not because he thought him to be a prophet, but because he was his father.” Scent the local working girl “Scent and the fat man drove in his badly rusted, badly dented Ford truck toward the Lullaby Motel over on Front Street. His calloused hands rode up and down her leg and she didn’t try to stop him. The radio played static-filled doo-wop. And out on the streets a heaping of destitution and debauchery.”.....Grady, Vlad and Kaz murdering psychopathic brothers out for revenge, and all this set against a town captivated by the charismatic salesmanship of Dr Freeman.

Jon Bassoff creates characters that “crackle” with electricity they can almost be viewed in 3d as their bawdy and colourful temperaments consume the reader from the opening paragraph. His directness and style in many respects reminds me of the writing of Donald Ray Pollock (The Devil All The Time) I shall look forward to reading future publications by Mr Bassoff as I know his best work is still to be written. ( )

The Incurables by Jon Bassoff is a very dark, bleak and sometimes uncomfortable read. I have always been fascinated by Dr. Walter Freeman who specialized in lobotomy so was intrigued by the idea of a novel featuring this controversial man.
Is the novel well written? Yes. Is it a feel good novel? Definitely not but then we are reading a novel in the horror genre. There are no happy endings or happy people. Jon Bassoff has stripped apart society at large and left us with an unsettling part: namely poverty and those who are often the ones left wanting; the mentally ill. ( )

Review copy

Jon Bassoff was born in 1974 in New York City and currently lives with his family in a ghost town somewhere in Colorado. His mountain gothic novel, Corrosion, was called "startlingly original and unsettling" by Tom Piccirilli, a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, and won the DarkFuse Reader's Choice Award for best novel. His surrealistic follow-up, Factory Town, was called "A hallucinatory descent into an urban hell" by Bram Stoker award-winning author Ramsey Campbell. For his day job, Bassoff teaches high school English where he is known by students and faculty alike as the deranged writer guy.

Bassoff's third novel is filled with characters with few, if any, socially redeeming qualities. The Incurables is set in the early 1950s, and Dr. Walter Freeman's nearly thirty years at the same mental institution are about to come to an end. Despite his many successes in treating the most insane of patients through a process he developed called a transorbital lobotomy, the times are changing and the institution's board is eager to move on to more humane treatments using modern medications to modify the behaviors of the asylum's residents.

Instead to changing his ways, Dr. Freeman sets out on his own with his most recent success and travels the country preaching his cure for many mental conditions. At the same time there is a father and son team of a preacher who is convinced his son is the Messiah.

If you like your horror dark and violent, The Incurables is most definitely for you. It's a book where once you start reading, you won't want to put it down. There are no heroes in this tale filled with delightfully despicable characters. Personally, I found the work to be a criticism of both science and religion, and whichever you put your faith in, there is no redemption to be found.

The Incurables is published by Darkfuse and is available in both paperback and e-book formats. If you subscribe to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited you can read this work at no additional charge. Plus, if you are an Amazon Prime member you can read this book for FREE as your monthly selection from the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Recommended. ( )