All the Pretty Dead Girls by John Manning

All the Pretty Dead Girls
by John Manning
Pinnacle Books, 2009.

Going off to college for the first time is always an adventure, but for Sue Barlow, it promises to be so much more. She will finally be on her own, away from the stifling grasp of the grandparents who raised her after the death of her mother. Sue hopes that Wilbourne College, her mother's alma mater in upstate New York, will give her both the freedom that she has never enjoyed and information about the parents she never knew. What she finds there is far more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.

All the Pretty Dead Girls by John Manning reminds me of a Dean Koontz novel or something by Clive Barker, without being quite as tightly written. The plot moves along nicely, for the most part, except for the back and forth between the past and the present, which I found a little disconcerting at times. This is definitely a "page-turner" in the most positive way and the twists of the plot surprised me more than a few times. It is not predictable or boring. I found the characters believable and pretty well fully-formed and although their dialogue sometimes falls a little flat the characters are not. I found myself conjuring them up in my mind... seeing what they would look and sound like.

I liked All the Pretty Dead Girls even though it runs a little more toward horror than I normally go these days. I was drawn in from the first page and read it straight through to the last. If you are a fan of Dean Koontz or Clive Barker, or even Peter Straub, I think you will enjoy All the Pretty Dead Girls.

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir by Neil White

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir
by Neil White
William Morrow, 304 pp, $25.99
On sale: June 2009

Located on a drowsy bend of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana, Carville is home to the National Hansen's Disease Museum. It was named for political personality James Carville's grandfather and was home to the Federal Medical Center, a minimum security facility for non-violent federal prisoners and inmates with chronic health problems. Carville, more importantly, was also home to the nation's only leprosarium, which in it's latter days - to both White's astonishment and my own - served as housing for leprosy patients and Federal inmates in the same building as well as an order of nuns within the grounds.

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is Neil White's memoir of the time he served as a inmate at the Federal Medical Center at Carville. Written as a series of chronological anecdotes, Sanctuary takes us through the circumstances that led to White's conviction for bank fraud, his sudden introduction to leprosy and his life as an inmate at Carville.

For anyone who is astounded at the very idea of leprosy - or Hansen's disease, as it is now called -- being a malady of the modern era (current US Department of Health statistics estimate that there are 6,500 cases as of this writing), this book will give you some insight into a few patient's experiences as well as dispelling some common myths about the disease. One woman's story is especially touching. Ella Bounds was committed to Carville at the age of 12, delivered to the front gate by her father, never to see her family again. Ella, in her 80's at the time of White's incarceration, had spent the vast majority of her life in the institution.

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is not a scholarly study of Hansen's disease in America, although it gives patients stricken with the disease a very human face. Moreso this is the story of one man's growth -- a sort of mid-life "coming of age" tale -- and a window into one mans very unique experience. By turns it is funny, intriquing, irreverent, shocking, and profoundly moving. Sanctuary is highly readable and deeply satisfying.