Review - Never Rest by Marshall Thornton

After battling leukemia for five years, nineteen-year-old Jake is ready to give up the fight. He’s out of treatment options, and his body is failing fast. His mother isn’t quite ready to give up, though. She signs Jake up for a new experimental treatment at a clinic in the middle of nowhere, Michigan. Jake is too weak to argue and is sure he's near the end by the time they arrive. He even feels like he died in the exam room, but he wakes up the next morning in a ward feeling, if not better, different. Perhaps the dying was just a dream. Perhaps not.

As the blurb for this book says, it’s a very modern take on “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. This is a very different story from the one it was inspired by. For one thing, there’s no grave robbing or sewing body parts together. For another, the point of view is from the “monster’s” side of things. Still present are some thought-provoking questions about cheating death and what it might mean to be caught between life and death.

The entire story is told from Jake’s point of view. He has some funny, although slightly dark, observations about his situation. The evolution from resigned-to-die to fighting to live seems perfectly natural, and you really want things to work out for Jake. But, you really have to wonder how things can work out. This is where the big questions raised by the story come in.

Other significant characters in the story include Jake’s mother, the very embodiment of a parental figure who won’t let go. She goes to some morally questionable extremes in her desperation to keep Jake alive. Dr Frankenstein becomes Dr Harry in this telling. As in the original tale, Dr Harry has some very personal motivations for trying to find a way to keep young men from dying, although in this book, those reasons take a while to come out.

Lastly, there’s Jake’s love interest, Goth, a fellow patient of the clinic. It’s his love for Goth that ultimately pushes Jake to want to live, and in a way, transforms him into the “monster” we sort of expect from this story.

“Never Rest” is available from Smashwords or see Bookshop.org to get a print copy that supports independent bookstores.