Let’s face it, insanity makes for a great story, and the centerpiece of many sanity-twisting stories is the fact that you cannot prove that you are sane. Neither can I. Our minds could have constructed the illusion of sanity, and everything could be a lie.

That has always been a fun concept to consider, and few stories I have read present it better than Eyes Wide Open by Ted Dekker.

Dekker’s story is constructed around two protagonists: Christy Snow, a seventeen year-old orphan with serious identity issues, and Austin Hartt, her genius boyfriend who is also an orphan.

To begin the story, Christy loses a silver locket which holds great sentimental value for her. While retracing her steps in a frantic search for her keepsake, she enters an abandoned hospital storage room which Austin uses as his private refuge for writing.

She falls through a trapdoor into a sort of basement, where she is trapped. She attempts to call Austin, but her message is cut off as her phone battery dies. In her panicky efforts to escape, she manages to kick through a panel, revealing the boiler room of a medical facility. Unfortunately for her, this particular facility is an insane asylum. Since there are no visitors allowed, the staff assumes that she is an escaped inmate and holds her to check if she is telling the truth.

Austin is busy auditing a graduate philosophy class at Harvard. Already worried about his severe migraine headaches, caused by a possible tumor on his brain, he gets a voicemail from a terrified Christy, who is cut off before she can say where she is. After checking everywhere else, he looks in his makeshift office, finding her locket and dead phone near an open trapdoor.

When he reaches the boiler room, he finds the asylum admissions director threatening an inmate with torture. He, too, is suspected of being an runaway inmate. He is knocked unconscious by the director to keep him from telling others of what he saw.

In the meantime, the staff has decided that Christy is actually an inmate named Alice Ringwald. During her attempt at escape, she finds Austin unconscious and wakes him up. They try to break out of the ward, but find themselves in the office of its administrator, Kern Lawson. They are separated for treatment, and Austin is informed that his name is Scott and he is suffering from delusions of grandeur and acute paranoia. From here the story follows their efforts to stay sane in an increasingly nightmarish situation, as Lawson’s experimental treatments twist their perceptions of reality.

I will readily admit that at this point, the story sounds like there is little positive material to be found thematically. However, Dekker manages to turn his plot into a parable of sorts dealing with identity and perceptions.

Dekker’s characters are strange, which had the odd effect of making them seem more human. They are aware of the fact that they are unusual, which adds to their insecurity, making them more relatable (and their growing doubt in their sanity more believable).

One criticism that I would offer is the implausibility of the setup stage of the book. The whole trapdoor thing seemed a bit far-fetched to me. To a degree, the strangeness of the introduction adds to the nightmarish vibe of the scene, but still, collapsing floorboards would have been more plausible and just as workable for the story.

The effect of the book as a whole, though, counteracts any small flaws. Eyes Wide Open was a story that made me sit back and think after I finished. Dekker, already well known for his intensely suspenseful novels, follows his specialty by providing a somewhat disturbing but gripping tale with an ultimately redemptive theme. The story moves at a breakneck pace, but without any of the action-thriller cliches that such a pace often implies. I would recommend this book to fans of psychological suspense novels or anyone else who feels like doubting their sanity for a little while.

Eyes Wide Open is 277 pages long, and can be found in paperback at bookstores locally or on Amazon for about $10. It is also available as a four part ebook, starting with Identity, which is free.

The author can be reached via Twitter: @m00re_is_better. Follow The Feather via Twitter: @thefeather.

For more reviews, read the April 7 article, ‘Winter Soldier’ proves best of Marvel movies.