Escape from Asylum

Escape from Asylum is a novel by the American writer Madeleine Roux, published by HarperCollins in 2016. It is set in the institution that appears in her earlier Asylum books, and it goes back to the period when that institution was at its busiest.

Rick Desmond is a teenager with a temper and parents who have run out of patience with him, and 1968 is a bad year to be sent to a psychiatric hospital in the United States. Brookline Asylum has a warden, Crawford, whose nurses do as he says, and it has a rumoured patient called Patient Zero. The book follows Rick as he works out who that patient is and what the warden has planned for the people in his care, and the building itself provides most of the atmosphere: long corridors, locked wards, and a system that treats the patients as material rather than people.

Roux's Asylum stories combine the ghost-story tradition with the history of institutional medicine, and this novel stands before the events of the books that were published first.