DIAGNOSIS TERMINAL: Final Cut; Survival; Wind Over Heaven; Petit Mal; All Over b

by F. Paul Wilson

From alternative medicine to murder, F.Paul Wilson's Terminal reveals terrors surgical, psychological, and institutional. In stark, operating-room light these fourteen writers take scalpel and pen to the body and soul of humanity as it lies stretched out on the stainless-steel page. Rendered in laser-sharp detail, these incisive narrative reveal our needs, our hurts, our desires, and our fears.This unsettling anthology submerges us in the near-witchcraft methods of a nineteenth abortionist and awes us with a post-apocalypse future where autistic mutants telepathically remove pain. But more than anything, it gives us frightening real glimpses of ourselves and a nightmarish medical future that may be here in five minutes--if it's not already.Featuring stories by F. Paul Wilson, Bill Pronzini, Chet Williamson, Matthew Costello, Billie Sue Mosiman, Steve Spruill, Richard Lee Byers, Thomas F. Monteleone, Tina L.Jens, Ridley Pearson, Jack Nimersheim, Brunch H. Rogers, Ed Gorman, and Karl Edward Wagner.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Suspense, Anthologies

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Francis Paul Wilson is an author, born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He writes novels and short stories primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. His debut novel was Healer (1976). Wilson is also a part-time practicing family physician. He made his first sales in 1970 to Analog and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. In 1981 he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller, The Keep, and helped define the field throughout the rest of the decade. In the 1990s he became a true genre hopper, moving from science fiction to horror to medical thrillers and branching into interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. He, along with Matthew J. Costello, created and scripted FTL Newsfeed which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992-1996.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/fpaulw...

Reviews

[NumberLord · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of medical thrillers with some touches of horror.
Angel of Mercy: A story of an old-time abortionist.
Dr. Joe: Interesting secrets revealed in a doctor's suicide note.
Friendly Wager: Failure to take a fellow traveler seriously comes at a cost.
Prosper Band, 05409021: Patient convicts get their revenge on the doctor.
Sinister: Separated twins live different lives, and one isn't too happy about it.
Bad Touch: You can't always trust your therapist, can you?
Get It Out: The kidnapper demands an emergency operation; what's a doctor to do?
The Cuban Solution: Janna's internship turns into a trip to the Twilight Zone.
All Over But The Dying: Sometimes medical advances require a good hitman.
Petit Mal: Nanotechnology meets medicine, but no one was prepared.
Wind Over Heaven: Sometimes the cook knows best how to handle the restaurant business.
Offshore: F. Paul Wilson contributes his libertarian tale of what happens when the government decides to get involved in medicine.
Survival: a frightening story of medicine in a post-apocalyptic world.
Final Cut: Some people like to preview their final resting place.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

PLACEHOLDER REVIEW: Got this through ILL for the Williamson story on my "to read" list, and as it turns out there was another on my list as well.

Seemingly (given some internal comment), this author query for this was "Medical Thriller short fiction", but with the usual tone-deafness that was one of the contributing factors in horror using up its reader's goodwill throughout the 90s, this is marketed with cover ad copy promising "an anthology of medical terror," while neither story seemed particularly "terrifying" to me...

"Dr. Joe" by Chet Williamson has a couple of police detectives faced with the suicide of a well-loved local GP, and more specifically faced with his suicide note in which he confesses to a career full of benign malfeasance (deliberately not treating terminal cases) in service of an insurance scam (taking out policies on the eventually-to-be-dead). Not horror, and just okay, it struck me as something that nowadays would end up in one of the Akashic Press NOIR series anthologies.

Meanwhile, Ed Gorman's "Survivor" is set in 2015, 6 years after the party of Evangelical Fascists have started a limited nuclear war, biowarfare has ravaged the land, half the population is mutated and hospital employ "paineaters" in the surgery room to....and I stopped reading. Sorry, modern sci-fi asin't my thing.

[Emma Whaley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good collection, could be scarier. It's just nothing special