Ferus Rex

The first novel by Jack Mardack, Ferus Rex is the story of a young psychiatrist (Antoinette Marelli) from an affluent, Connecticut background, who takes her first job in an inner-city New York hospital.A ten-year old Dominican boy (William Rivera) has suffered an inexplicable mental breakdown and has caused the death of another boy in a street fight. When William comes under the Doctor’s care for psychiatric evaluation, the boy immediately becomes the Doctor’s preeminent concern. Though William is lost in a roil of terrifying dreams and plaguing visions, he gradually reveals clues to the true causes of his tragedy to Antoinette.In her professional zeal to uncover the mystery of this enigmatic and compelling little boy’s plight, she blunders into an alien landscape of Afro-Caribbean Voodoo and drug dealers.The boy’s shattered mother (Carmen Rivera) offers herself to the Doctor as a guide into this dark realm when the boy is abducted one night from the hospital by his drug-dealer father (Felo Rivera).As the relationship between the two women deepens, the Doctor discovers there is considerably more behind Carmen’s passion and despair than merely a concern for her son.By the time the Doctor realizes that her own curiosities and desires have overstepped professional boundaries, it’s too late to stop herself from plummeting headlong toward whatever lies at the end of her search.The inevitable disclosure of the truth delivers all four characters into the mouth of darkest terror.

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