Book Review: Descent into the Hallway of Madness

For Halloween, a book full of horrors and gross-outs...

Title: Descent into the Hallway of Madness 

Author: Anthony DiAngelo

Date: 2020

Publisher: Anthony Di Angelo

ISBN: 979-8686202177

Length: 409 pages

Quote: "He craved almost ceaseless action because he couldn't stand the silence of solitude."

People who can't stand the silence of solitude can be dangerous. In this thriller, full of almost ceaseless "action" and crass sex and violence, such a person is the serial murderer. Part of what's made him such a successful murderer is his psychotic condition.  

That's about all I'll say about the plot except to confess that I walked right into the psychological trap of the mystery novel. So will you if you think, as it's deliberately easy to think, that DiAngelo clumsily reveals the murderer's identity in chapter one. He doesn't. Chapter one is the set-up to keep you guessing how that character is doing all this evil and thus missing the clues that another character...oh, read it yourself and find out. 

What else do you need to know before reading this novel? It's full of sex, violence, violent sex, and sexualized violence. It's full of moral confusion: the good characters do bad things. The virtuous police detective wants a suspect to confess, so she barges into his hospital room and yanks the tube out of his throat, sneers when they realize that he still can't speak, aims a weapon right at his sensitive parts and orders him to "write fast." Apart from short-term pain, panic, and humiliation the suspect seems to be no closer to death after this bit of police brutality than he was before, and the detective has very virtuously resisted an urge to assume he's guilty and kill him--so, is torturing a helpless patient a virtuous act? Lots of moral confusion. Meh. Dostoyevsky and Joseph Heller have presented moral confusion  in less sensational ways, so it's probably not a good idea for students to read this book and try to convince teachers that you're reading it as a study of the interactions between good and evil in human life.

And it's one of those (hundreds of) thrillers where the author's purpose is to deplore men's violence against women, but in order to deplore it he depicts it in enough detail that the book amounts to porn for sadists. Actually, both the male and the female detective in this book are divorced and sleep around enough, in scenes narrated in detail, that the older generation would have called Descent into the Hallway of Madness porn, period. 

And DiAngelo's writing style would undoubtedly please some editors and reviewers, including this one, more if he'd adhered to the rule "Show, not tell" in conversation scenes and been content to "tell, not show" in bedroom scenes. 

I didn't enjoy it. Well, I'm not the reader who's supposed to enjoy it. Stories like this one are written for guys, not for aunts. For people who like thrillers that consist mostly of cross-gender violence, this is the kind of thing they like. By way of Redeeming Social Value, readers learn a bit about a rare psychiatric disorder. 

(Can psychiatric patients change the color of their eyes? Easily. Hitler did it all the time, being on drugs. Eyes that are not normally described as dark, having a ring of blue, green, or gray around the pupil, seem to darken when the person is interested in what person is looking at, when the pupils dilate (expand) to take in more light. Some drugs and other forms of brain damage can cause the pupils to stay dilated for hours on end. Newsreel film clearly showed that in his most exuberant moments Hitler had distinctly black eyes, and in calmer moods his eyes were blue. A few people really do get that effect from a disease condition, rather than drugs.)