The Journals Of Eleanor Druse [Paperback]

Its predecessor, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer , tied in to the Rose Red miniseries, was a bestseller partly because many believed King wrote it (it was actually written by Ridley Pearson) and partly because some people thought the book was based on a real supernatural investigation.

The Journals opens with a letter to King by Eleanor (Sally to her friends) Druse, asking for help in carrying out her research into the events at Kingdom Hospital in Maine, where she has uncovered an otherworldly crisis. She wants King to have her journals, recorded between late 2002 and 2003, in case something happens to her.

The septuagenarian is a volunteer and regular patient at Kingdom Hospital, well known by staff and patients alike. One of her oldest friends, Madeline Kruger, is hospitalized on a stormy winter night after attempting suicide. In 1939, Sally and Maddy were both admitted to the old Kingdom Hospital, suffering from whooping cough, shortly before the hospital burned to the ground.

Maddy leaves behind a message indicating that something happened to them sixty years ago that Sally has successfully banished from her memory. Perhaps something related to the mysterious lesion that appears on a brain scan taken after Sally collapses and strikes her head when she witnesses something horrible after Maddy dies.

Sally is a believer in mystical events and often conducts siances with her fellow patients at the hospital. She carries healing crystals and meditates to try to communicate with those who have passed on before her. After Maddy's deathbed revelation, Sally becomes aware that the tormented spirit of a young girl haunts Kingdom Hospital, struggling to convey another message.

Sally's badgers her unambitious, beleaguered son Bobby into acquiring Maddy's old records and papers to help her uncover what she has been repressing for six decades while she simultaneously deals with persistent spirits at the hospital - among them a sinister shade she calls Dr. Rat - and the various levels of incompetence exhibited by the hospital's staff, including scalpel-happy Dr. Stegman, in exile from Boston General, who has left a trail of surgical horror stories on his record.

The Journals overlaps some of the events to be played out during the fifteen-hour series, which debuts on ABC on March 3rd, but it also provides backstory only available to readers of this book. The anonymous author knows his or her medicine, especially neuroscience, and the volume makes for interesting reading on its own, though it ends with Sally's mission only partly complete.

To discover more about the mysteries being played out in Kingdom Hospital, readers will have to turn on the television and see what Stephen King has in store for them this spring.

Reminiscent of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and its tie-in to the TV miniseries Rose Red, this novel disguised as nonfiction is a tie-in to the Stephen King TV series Kingdom Hospital. It consists of Eleanor's journals of her investigation into the paranormal occurrences at the hospital, the identity of a child whose phantom cries only she can hear, and the secrets of her own past. The novel reveals an explanation for only part of the mysteries Eleanor is investigating. Her introduction to the journal, a cover letter to Stephen King, warns "Please read these pages as an introduction only to what I believe will one day be a complete scientific assessment of the remarkable occurrences witnessed by myself and others at Kingdom Hospital..." Although this book sets the scene for the TV series that follows, it can stand alone on its own merits.

I recommend this novel as a well-crafted blend of the factual and the fictional. You will learn something about neurological diseases and their treatment as the doctors deal with Eleanor's hallucinations. You will shiver at the spookiest of supernatural events as Eleanor attempts to bridge the gap between the past and the present, and between life and the first state of the afterlife.

Eileen Rieback