Classic Thriller Annotation - Coma

Coma by Robin Cook

Medical Thriller. Published by Little, Brown & Company, 1977.

Coma is a classic medical thriller written by Robin Cook in 1977. It was Robin Cook’s second novel, and he has written several others since. Some, like Coma, were stand-alone, and some are part of a series. Also, there was a movie based on the book. GoodReads.com says the following about Coma:

Still considered one of the best of the genre, Coma propelled Robin Cook to the top of his field and earned him a reputation as the "master of the medical thriller" (New York Times).

In Coma, at the prestigious brownstone Boston Memorial Hospital, a new group of third year medical students is about to start their rotation. At the same time, something is happening at the hospital. People are coming in for minor surgery, and everything is fine, except that some of the patients are having an idiosyncratic reaction: they aren’t waking up. Dr. Susan Wheeler wants to know why.

Dr. Susan Wheeler is the main character in the book. She is just beginning her third year and just starting out her surgery rotation at the hospital. Honest enough to know she is untrained, new enough to not be unmoved, her idealism drives her forward. She is focused, and she is female. In addition to the main story, a significant part of the story is about the struggle of a female medical student in a male-dominated field of surgery.

The action also builds through the story. By the end there are several interesting twists and complications. Some of the action is not traditional in a sense – death by coma is not active, but it can be chilling or terrifying. The ending is not quite what one would expect, and it makes for an interesting read. From the middle of the book onward, there are some more traditional action scenes as well.

The pacing builds slowly but methodically. The sections are short and marked with a dates and times which show the steady forward progression. At times the clinical and scientific presentation can make the story feel slow.

The tone is somewhere between bleak and menacing. The book is a medical thriller, and there are several surgeries and situations described in some detail – including anatomical and scientific details. Some aspects of the descriptions can be gruesome. While medical science has progressed in the last three decades, to someone without a background in medicine the explanations still sound plausible.

For similar reads, among the LibraryThing.com recommendations are the following:

• Contagion and other books by Robin Cook
• Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
• Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

If a patron would be interested in books that become movies, LibraryThing.com has the following in their recommendations for Coma as well:

• Congo by Michael Crichton
• Jaws by Peter Benchley

Among the GoodReads.com suggestions are the following:

• Harvest by Tess Gerritsen
• Natural Causes by Michael Palmer