The Thanatos Syndrome - Hardcover

Percy, Walker

3.54

1,984 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374273553 ISBN 13: 9780374273552

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987

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Returning home to the small Louisiana parish where he had praticed psychiatry, Dr. Tom More quickly notices something strange occuring with the townfolk, a loss of inhibitions. Behind this mystery is a dangerous plot drug the local water supply, and a discovery that takes More into the underside of the American search for happiness.

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From the Publisher:

"What a pleasure it is to read a real novel.... THE THANATOS SYNDROME has the ambition and purposefulness to take on the world, to wrestle with its shortcomings, and to celebrate its glories." -Washington Post Book World

"He is a dazzlingly gifted novelist.... Percy stages a lively medical mystery...that no serious reader will want to miss." -USA Today

"There is ample evidence of Percy's brilliance in THE THANATOS SYNDROME - the droll Dixie anthropology, the pitch-perfect dialogue, the sheer intelligence everywhere on the page.... It is splendidly, uproariously catholic, as well." --Douglas Bauer, Atlantic Monthly

"Shimmers with intelligence and verve...THE THANATOS SYNDROME is highbrow hilarity all the more discerning for distinguishing its tears behind lots of laughs." --Newsday

From the Inside Flap:

When Dr. Tom More is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred, where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. He immediately notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, his own wife's extraordinary success at bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer.

With the ingenious help of his attractive cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, Dr. More begins to uncover a criminal experiment to "improve" people's behavior by drugging the area's water supply. But beyond this grand scheme are activities so sinister that even Tom More wouldn't believe them if he hadn't witnessed them with his own eyes...

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