I'm not generally a big fan of ambiguous endings, that is, if the ending is wide-open. Well no, I had to read the ending again to decide which side of the the ambiguity I wanted to be in. And when the ending of the ending came? I needed a cup of coffee to sort it out. When the twist came eventually, it still took me by surprise. They were generous enough not to talk about the ending, but they dropped tantalizing hints about how awesome it was. To add to their troubles, there's a vicious storm brewing and communications with the mainland has failed.Įven before I started, I knew there is a major twist in the ending, thanks to my wonderful friends who had to mince the movie ambiguities in my presence, when it first released. What Chuck doesn't know is Teddy has his own personal vendetta to carry out and that getting out of the island may be harder than either of them expected. Teddy is convinced that the place reeks of radical brain treatments and experimentation. US Marshall Teddy Daniels arrives in Shutter Island along with his partner Chuck Aule to investigate the disappearance of an inmate from this inescapable fortress. Instead, I got pulled into this thriller right from page one and enjoyed it to the last page.

There were no heavy-vocab crunching or roundabout phrases, which is the impression Mystic River the movie put into my head. Here's the first thing I noticed - Dennis Lehane's writing flows easy. So instead, when I saw Shutter Island at an airport bookstore, after browsing through the shelves for 15 minutes (making me almost late for my boarding), I decided to risk it. Second, because I never really understood the movie, Mystic River, and had to read reviews and spoilers to actually know what it was about. It's not that I'm not keen on reading it, I'm terrified. Now I have a huge tome of Mystic River staring at me every time I look at my shelf. At that point, I didn't know the movie was based on a book, but when I did come across the book many years later, I knew I had to read it. My very first introduction to Dennis Lehane was through the movie, Mystic River. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all.

The book shutter island