Sex, Drugs, and Doctor Death

S.P. Caldwell’s “The Beast of Bethulia Park” offers a dissident perspective to the culture of death. This powerful novel about one particular surreptitious serial killer serves as a metaphor for our world, in which Big Brother has formed an unholy alliance with Dr. Death, putting in place the systemic extermination of the weak and the voiceless, the very young and the very old.

Something good and yet dark and deadly is emerging from the depths of darkest England. The something good is Gracewing, a Catholic publisher, based in the small and quaint market town of Leominster in Herefordshire, which is responsible for keeping the light of goodness, truth and beauty flickering in the gloom of contemporary English culture. The something dark and deadly is to be found in the pages of The Beast of Bethulia Park, a grippingly gruesome thriller of a novel which Gracewing has recently published.

Bethulia Park is the name of a hospital in Lancashire in England’s industrial north. The “Beast” is Dr. Reinhard Klein, a handsome, highly respected and much-admired physician who hides a deadly secret. We first meet him at the inquest into the death of an elderly man whose family claimed had died prematurely due to medical negligence. Although the man had died under his watch, Dr. Klein walks into the courtroom with a confidence that is almost nonchalant. The first-person narrator, whom we later discover is a young and attractive journalist, Jenny Bradshaigh, gives her first impressions of the handsome young doctor: “He strolled in and owned the room. What makes some people like that? Magnetism, charisma, confidence – Klein had these qualities by the bucketload. He was good-looking too and he knew it. His lush brown hair was slicked tidily back. His navy suit was immaculately tailored, following the contours of his gym-toned physique as perfectly as a coat of paint.” Such is the beauty of the beast, reminding us, should we need reminding, that the Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.

The young journalist is repelled by the way that the nurses are flirting with the dashing young doctor, forgetful of the fact that they are in a courtroom, “the little coquettes, joking and laughing with him as he settled into their midst, batting their eyelashes and giggling playfully as he held court, those closest to him leaning into him with their breasts.” She is repelled but she is also feeling an uncomfortable attraction and is embarrassed when Klein glances up and catches her staring at him.

Magnetism….

Sexual attraction saunters through the pages of The Beast of Bethulia Park, casting its sensual and occasionally sordid shadow. Its shadow falls on the young journalist Jenny, the beautiful young nurse, Emerald Essien and on the young and naïve hospital chaplain, Father Calvin Baines. And yet the novel’s author, S.P. Caldwell, casts the shadow dexterously and decorously, avoiding the voyeuristic tendency of most modern novelists to violate the imagination of the reader with salacious slime and (porno)graphic detail. Caldwell, who is clearly a committed Catholic, tantalizes but never titillates. The sexual element is handled so well that we find ourselves repelled by the various extra-marital liaisons, especially insofar as they are acts of betrayal as well as acts of lust.

So much for the sex.

The Beast of Bethulia Park is also intoxicated with the deadly drugs administered by Dr. Death and by a mysterious accomplice called Octavia, whose identity is not discovered until near the end of the novel, in one of the many twists which keep us turning the pages.

As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear to Jenny and to Father Calvin, and to the reader, that Dr. Klein is systematically killing or culling his elderly patients, disguising his crimes with disgusting ease, empowered by a system that presumes that the “expert” is always right and is not to be questioned. The drugs are prescribed legally in a manner designed to make the patient appear worse, thereby enabling the ministering of stronger, deadlier drugs. After the patient is seen to deteriorate still further, the doctor offers his “expert” diagnosis that the patient’s condition is terminal and that the most humane course of action is to deprive the patient of fluids, condemning him or her to an agonizing death through dehydration.

Such is Dr. Klein’s crass disregard for the dignity of the human person that we are not surprised to discover that he treats his own wife and children with the same crassness with which he treats the women he abuses and the patients he kills. Although he seems to be a good father to his two daughters, he tells his wife, when she tells him that she is pregnant, that he expects her to have an abortion should this child be another girl.

In brief and in sum, The Beast of Bethulia Park is a powerful fictional exposé of the culture of death. It lifts the lid on those who employ euphemisms to sugarcoat the killing and culling of innocent people, whether it be the reduction of the unborn child to the status of the depersonalized fetus or whether it be the disguising of the culling of the old and unwanted with cozy-sounding words like euthanasia.

In this sense, this powerful novel about one particular surreptitious serial killer serves as a metaphor for the culture of death itself, which is itself a surreptitious serial killer on a scale of which Adolf Hitler could only dream. In an Orwellian sense, we’re living in a world in which Big Brother has formed an unholy alliance with Dr. Death. This demonic duo, Big Brother and Dr. Death, have put in place the systemic extermination of the weak and the voiceless, the very young and the very old. As in all ages, literature can raise a dissident voice to the tyranny of the age. The Beast of Bethulia Park offers such a dissident perspective. We can but hope that it will be not merely a plot-twister and page-turner but a game-changer. Either way, it offers a deft and defiant response to the nightmare that systemic pride has unleashed.

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