Hypochondriac Gambler, A tale of Hermes by Neil M. CampbellMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book attempts to illustrate the ease with which the main protagonist, Kate, falls prey to her obsession with gambling. There are plenty of twists in the tale to intrigue you and a curious list of well-written characters throughout. She suffers a lot of pain that is explained away by her physician/therapist as imaginary since medical tests cannot confirm Kate’s suspicions that there are real causes, like tumours and so on. After reading the first few chapters of the slow start I began to consider the plot as contrived and slightly unbelievable when you are expected to accept that Kate is also a trained and experienced psychiatrist. However, I continued to read in the hope that the story would begin to feel more authentic.
The book is written with Kate’s chapters in the first person whilst all other chapters are written as a third person narrative, which always comes across to me as a kind of cheat that rarely seems to work. Kate’s chapters often felt self-obsessed and puerile, and not at all like the educated professional she was meant to be. Unfortunately, the frequent departure into the Hermetic worlds of Greek and Egyptian philosophy did nothing to confirm for me the idea that the story was not too pretentious to be believable after all.
There was a character called Ray Hopkins that never became a ‘real’ person in my imagination, even though all of the other characters were quite engaging and acceptable. The ending explanation about Kate’s hidden memory of her fiancé’s death was even more contrived for me; much in the same way that the many coincidences in the story were included in the rather tedious re-telling(s) of Kate’s situation was. Although the blurb describes the book as a Romance I’m not sure that many fans of that genre would agree or enjoy it. In addition, there were some editing issues that needed correcting.
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