I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I started reading athe Graceview Patient, but it sure was a crazy ride by the time it was over! Were introduced to Margaret, who suffers from autoimmune issues and suffers from debilitating pain. She enters into a clinical trial at a hospital that she basically is told and makes her believe will improve her symptoms and let her return to a normal life. Initially all seems kosher. Slowly, we’re treated to a story that feels creepy, hopeless, and is so unlike anything I’ve read before. To, it’s part thriller and part horror. And just when i thought the story couldn’t get any more strange, it did! There were some moments I was confused about, but overall this was definitely something I’d recommend for anyone that likes a creepy read!

I chose this book because, like main character Margaret Culpepper, I also have an autoimmune disorder. Like Margaret, it sometimes seems like I’m playing Whac-A-Mole with symptoms since no specific treatment exists.

Fortunately for me, however, I have never gone through a treatment protocol that caused me to be miserably sick and totally disoriented. Author Caitlin Starling uses this as a jumping off point for the rest of the book.

What is real? What is manufactured by Margaret’s fevered imagination? Does some other explanation exist?

So many questions. “The Graceview Patient” is a page-turner, in part because I kept looking for answers and was never quite sure I’d found them.

Starling’s book is well-written, and Margaret, to me, was a sympathetic character who certainly had traveled a long, hard road to get to a place where she might have hope.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance reader’s copy. This is my honest review.

Good grief this book had me on edge. The locked in a hospital feeling is always hard for me and it really made me feel like I was there

This story follows Meg Culpepper on her journey as a patient undergoing an experimental trial. As the medications ramp up, Meg begins to deteriorate, physically and mentally. Are the things she’s seeing and hearing real or is she slowly losing her mind?

I really enjoyed this novel! It was well-written, suspenseful, and descriptive in an immersive way. It was a bit of a slow burn for me, but once events began to ramp up, the storyline stayed exciting.

4 ⭐️!

It is definitely outside the scope of what I normally read, but The Graceview Patient completely pulled me in. This anxiety-inducing medical horror had me confused in the best way and genuinely on the edge of my seat. It plays with perception and paranoia so well that I found myself questioning everything right alongside the protagonist. Starling knows how to make unease linger on the page, and while I am still unsure how I feel about the ending, maybe that is part of what makes it stick.

Another favourite read of 2025. This is one of the best medical horror books that I have read in a very long time. The setting, mood and the downward spiral of Margaret was delicious to read. I could literally feel her own desperation and helplessness. You also know that a book is superb when it literally gives you nightmares. This was fabulous and I loved it. No notes.

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙶𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠 𝙿𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚝
4/5! 🌟🌟🌟🌟

This is exactly the kind of book I would reach for if I had to pick a book from the horror genre. I'm that girl that would walk around an abandoned asylum/hospital in the middle of the night just because. After reading the synopsis for this book, I knew I needed to read it.

💉🩸𝚂𝚢𝚗𝚘𝚙𝚜𝚒𝚜:

Margaret Culpepper suffers from an auto immune disorder that has left her feeling defeated. As a last attempt to get her life back, she agrees to a fully paid trial experiment at Graceview Hospital. Two or three months of grueling treatment to destroy her immune system and build it back from the ground up. However, as treatment progresses and becomes more physically and psychologically pressing, Margaret begins to question reality and the things she's seeing. Is she the one losing her mind, or is there truly something dark and deadly lurking in the halls of Graceview Hospital?

💉🩸 𝚃𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜:

What a mind fuck of a book. Very rarely do I read horror/thriller novels, because they can be so easy to predict. I truly did not know what was reality, and what was being hallucinated. The whole book was a mind-twisting, claustrophobic experience that had me guessing the entire time.

I felt for Margaret. I felt every tiresome drawing of blood, every exhausting effort to want to keep going. It made me tired. It really puts into perspective how terrifying and isolating being a patient can be. So many experiences where I've been in a hospital and thought: "I just wanna go home." This book will put you there.

It was cringe-worthy, the descriptions of the terrors Margaret witnessed was enough to put goosebumps on my arms. You felt trapped, with no escape in sight, and that's a feeling I hate. I've never felt squeamish about medical procedures and bodily horrors, but this bugged me. Something about flesh being ripped from your skin bugged me. Definitely will trigger anyone who has any kind of fear about hospitals and medical tactics.

My only complaint is the end. I felt like the end was short-lived and wasn't enough for the long, mentally exhausting journey we had to go through with Margaret. It felt like a long journey that ended too abruptly. Overall though, I loved this. I loved the writing, the story, the plot and all the characters we had the pleasure of loving and hating. Definitely a new author to add to my TBR.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

(3.5 rounded up) This is a modern gothic horror novel set within a hospital that our narrator/patient can’t escape. Margaret is suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease with no chance of cure or even respite, so she takes the opportunity to join a medical study at a hospital that will, in essence, destroy her immune system and then re-train it. The treatment is aggressive and brutal and while enduring it, Margaret starts to feel that something isn’t right with this program. It’s the classic gothic set-up where you are unsure if the narrator is losing their grip on reality or if there is something truly wrong outside the narrator’s mind. The chronic illness and medicinal side effects Margaret/Meg is living with in this heightens the tensity of what is unknown and the locked ward setting feels extremely oppressive. There’s something to be said too, for writing a character with chronic illness who is not believed or is condescended to by the people around her, which exacerbates her health and illness, which I imagine is a feeling chronically-ill people have to deal with frequently. I loved the writing and the set-up, but was a bit disappointed with the ending. The book feels like it’s building and building and building to…eventually not very much. Which was bummer, because I otherwise enjoyed this!

What do you get when you mix a telepathic patient, a possibly haunted town, and a psychiatrist who’s in way over her head? A gloriously twisty, mind-bending ride! The Graceview Patient is sharp, eerie, and deliciously strange in the best possible way. Caitlin Starling serves up psychological suspense with just the right amount of sci-fi weirdness, and I was hooked from page one. If you like your thrillers with a side of “what the heck is going on?”, this one’s for you.

In The Graceview Patient, Caitlin Starling delivers a harrowing and atmospheric psychological horror novel that masterfully dissects the terror embedded not in monsters or the supernatural, but in the institutions meant to heal us. Set within the sterile, labyrinthine confines of Graceview Memorial Hospital, Starling’s narrative exudes a claustrophobic dread that intensifies with each chapter, immersing readers in an unsettling world where reality is malleable and trust is a luxury no one can afford.

The novel’s protagonist, Margaret, is undergoing an experimental medical treatment—one that fragments her grasp on reality and renders her a deeply unreliable narrator. Starling leverages this uncertainty to extraordinary effect. Readers are thrust into Margaret’s perspective, where hallucinations blur with reality, and paranoia becomes indistinguishable from truth. Even as the novel reaches its climactic revelations, ambiguity persists: we are never fully certain whether what we’ve witnessed has occurred or whether it is yet another byproduct of a chemically induced delusion. It is this persistent ambiguity that fuels the novel’s psychological potency.

Margaret’s descent into confusion and fear unfolds slowly, almost methodically. Her deteriorating physical condition mirrors the unraveling of her mental state. Every ache, every fever dream, is rendered with clinical precision, drawing attention to the deeply corporeal nature of her suffering. The hospital’s cold, indifferent walls become a character of their own—silent, oppressive, and omnipresent. As she becomes increasingly isolated, the narrative tightens around her, producing a visceral sense of entrapment that borders on suffocation.

Beyond its immediate narrative, The Graceview Patient engages with larger thematic concerns, particularly the ethical grey zones of medical experimentation and the power imbalances within healthcare systems. Starling interrogates what it means to surrender autonomy in the name of healing, and what horrors can be born from that surrender. The novel does not rely on gore or traditional jump scares; rather, its terror arises from confusion, helplessness, and the erosion of personal agency—a horror grounded in the all-too-familiar realities of illness and institutional control.

The supporting cast, too, is enshrouded in uncertainty. Allies shift into potential antagonists, motives are obscured, and the reader—like Margaret—is left to question the sincerity of every smile, the purpose behind every clinical procedure. Starling’s prose is taut and immersive, her pacing deliberate yet relentless, and her ability to sustain dread throughout the novel is nothing short of masterful.

Ultimately, The Graceview Patient is not merely a horror novel—it is an experience: a tightly wound exploration of what it means to be unmade, piece by piece, within the very spaces that claim to restore us. Starling crafts a narrative that lingers long after its conclusion, not with overt shocks, but with a persistent unease, a sense that something within the reader has shifted.

In redefining the horror of hospitals—not as a setting for grotesque spectacle but as a symbol of disorientation, loss, and silent suffering—Starling proves, once again, that she does not simply write horror; she articulates the reasons it remains with us.

Verdict: The Graceview Patient is an unrelenting, intelligent, and profoundly affecting work that cements Caitlin Starling’s status as one of contemporary horror’s most compelling voices. A must-read for those who seek not just fear, but understanding in their terror.

Caitlin Starling may be a new autoread author for me. Her range is astonishing, and that I get two books in a year from her, with one of them being a gothic hospital story that focuses on a woman with chronic illness and her last ditch attempt medical trial, and I am eating in the best kind of way. This focuses heavily on the loss of autonomy that comes in a hospital at times (all the way up to being kept against her will and drugged), the liminal space of a hospital, and some absolutely spooky ass experimental twists with the experiments. Pick this up and enjoy the ride.

As a person with a chronic illness, this story is my worst nightmare. Poor and cut off from most of her friends due to the illness that is slowly killing her, she agrees to enter a study that might cure her once and for all. This story preys upon the worst fears of the chronically ill--the hope of being 100% well someday. The story builds, knowing that a cure is not likely to happen to the heroine, but still hoping. Only to find a terrible secret lurking behind the hospital doors.

This slow burn of a story of a patient's experimental medical trial, or is it? I was never sure what was what was going on. A great read!

#NetGalley

Honestly, this book had me second guessing everything. I felt like I was the one being paranoid. I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. A fantastic book that hooked me from the beginning and made me sad when it was over! Claustrophobic. atmospheric, and gripping from beginning to end! 5 stars!!

Meg has a rare auto immune condition and agrees to an inpatient hospital trial. She doesn't have any close friends or work colleagues and she doesn't tell her family about her hospital stay. So no one knows where she will be for several months. She is put into isolation in the trial and things start getting weird. Are they really getting weird? Or is Meg just hallucinating from her treatment? This was a page turner. Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martins Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Margaret has a medical condition that has made her life a living and there is no cure for it. So when she is offered a spot in a clinical trial for experimental drugs, and she gets paid for this spot, she decides to go ahead with it. She must live at the hospital as a full time patient during the process. As treatments begin she starts to wander the halls of Graceview Hospital and meets some of the other patients. Then one day one of the patients is gone, then one of the nurses is gone and even though she was told the nurse no longer works there then why did Margaret stumble across here in one of the rooms. Is this all her hallucinating from the drugs or is it real.......Welcome to Graceview Hospital, you can enter but you can never leave....oh wait that's Hotel California....Enjoy!!!

That was not nice of Caitlin Starling… I was very engaged in the welfare and care of the main character and the mysterious apparition that was introduced! But then I turned the page, and out of nowhere, the book ended! How can you write such a unique and intriguing story but just say “The End” and never tell us what happened? Is there a Book 2 coming and I just missed that notification? 2 Stars ⭐️⭐️!

I don’t know how to articulate my feelings about this book. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story that felt quite so suffocating and anxiety-inducing.

The whole thing felt like some weird, hallucinogenic nightmare fuel. As someone who deals with chronic illness and an autoimmune disease, reading The Graceview Patient comes with its own unique level of terror. If you’ve experienced any sort of medical trauma or gaslighting from medical professionals, you know that particular flavor of stress and anxiety.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I’m not sure that I liked the main character all that well, but I still desperately wanted her to persevere. This is the second book from Caitlin Starling that I’ve read, and I’m very much looking forward to reading her other novels!

Caitlin Starling’s The Graceview Patient is a harrowing, beautifully constructed piece of hospital gothic that turns the sterile familiarity of long-term care into something deeply uncanny. Told from the perspective of Meg, a woman undergoing an experimental treatment for a rare autoimmune disorder, the novel explores what happens when bodily autonomy and trust in reality start to erode—slowly, then all at once.

This is horror grounded in the real: isolation, touch deprivation, institutional gaslighting, and the quiet, procedural nature of medical trauma. Starling captures the sensory strangeness of hospital life with remarkable precision. Her depiction of a long-term stay doesn’t sensationalize the setting; it understands it. Meg’s increasing paranoia, paired with her drug-altered perspective, pulls the reader into the same claustrophobic fog. You start to question everything right alongside her.

The scenes with Meg’s nurse, Isobel, are especially haunting—intimate, unsettling, and evolving into being disorientingly kind. And the ending? It offers no easy resolution. Meg’s mind is so fractured by the final pages that we, like her, are left unsure what was real. It feels almost like cosmic horror: the terror of losing control not to a monster, but to a system too big to comprehend.

As someone who has spent time in similar hospital rooms, watching my father die (physically and mentally) of brain cancer, this novel felt viscerally accurate in ways that were both validating and difficult. It’s a story that sees the horror of healthcare not as blood and gore, but as confusion, helplessness, and being slowly unmade.

Starling doesn’t just write horror—she writes why it haunts us.

A chilling, twisted story of illness and medical experimentation, THE GRACEVIEW PATIENT is another masterpiece from the ever-amazing Caitlin Starling.