In The Madman’s Hotel by Niall Breslin, a descendant of Julia Leonard, a former patient in the now-abandoned St. Loman’s Hospital, reaches out to Niall, a mental health advocate, for help finding Julia’s body after almost all markers and crosses are removed from the hospital’s graveyard by Ireland’s health department, the owner of the hospital’s grounds. Julie’s determination to bury her great-grandmother’s remains next to her grandfather is surprising and remarkable given what little information she and her grandfather had about Julia.
It’s an interesting story that wants to be like other audiobooks where the narration is interspersed with snippets of interviews, but its bizarre editing style hampers and distracts from it. The audio editor frequently cuts off an interviewee’s answer with a hard fade while the narrator takes over speaking for them or over them. Sometimes the narrator even speaks over himself in his own interview. It’s as if the producers assume the listener doesn’t have the attention span to listen to the interviewee’s answer in their own words.
Alternatively, it’s possible the interview audio was so bad that it would have been distracting to use more of it. The interviews often sound as if they were conducted in an echoey room without the proper equipment to pick up clean audio. I’ve listened to audio books like this in the past, and they can be annoying and difficult to listen to. Even if that were the case, however, My Mom’s Murder’s approach, where the narrator repeats what the interviewee said when the audio is difficult to decipher, would have been a less distracting choice.
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