Shutter Island is a 2003 fiction novel written by Dennis Lehane. A film adaptation of the novel directed by Martin Scorsese is scheduled to be released in February of 2010.
Shutter Island met with commercial and critical success, and was on the best sellers list of The New York Times.[1]
The novel was published by the Harper Collins publication company in April of 2003. Reception to the novel was mostly favourable.
The year is 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island; home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems. Official Synopsis written by author Dennis Lehane.
With Shutter Island, author Dennis Lehane sought to write a novel that would be a homage to Gothic settings, B movies, and pulp. Lehane described the novel as a hybrid of the works of the Brontë sisters and the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The author wanted to write the main characters in a position where they would lack twentieth-century conventions such as radio communications. He also structured the book to be more taut than his previous book, Mystic River.
Reception
Shutter Island was successful both with critics and general readers. It was on the bestsellers list of The New York Times. USA Today, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, and other major dailies published enthusiastic reviews.