The Dreadmoor Experiment by Barrie Stevenson

A heart-stopping medical thriller set in the near future: pacy and chillingly plausible.

What if your doctor isn’t a safe pair of hands?

When his heart implant automatically resuscitates him, junior doctor Elliott Harrison finds himself face down on the chest of a dead girl. Around him, the St Luke’s emergency department is in chaos: overworked staff, limited space, burnout, terrified family members, and an unending influx of new patients fighting for their lives. It’s Elliott’s tenth night working without a break and he’s about to make a mistake that will ruin his life.

The medical scenes in Dreadmoor are fabulous. Visual. Lean. Tense. Author Barrie Stevenson himself is an emergency doctor and his experience breaths horrifying life into the resuscitation scenes where human fragility meets medical expertise in an uncertain battle. I can feel Stevenson’s knowledge on the page. I loved the unflinching medical vocabulary and the precision of his word choice in those high-stakes moments.

So, it’s no surprise that I was also gripped by the Author’s Note at the end, in which he gives a chilling sketch of the contemporary A&E scene in the UK, and nods to the marvels of medical engineering and gadgetry. In medicine, science fiction is already here. Which makes the diabolical device at the heart of The Dreadmoor Experiment all the more frightening.

A thrilling debut.

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