This one was pretty much a bust across the board. Despite a wonderfully creepy cover and an attempt to ape the success of Peregrine's vintage photography gimmick, Asylum failed to live up to the expectations set by the former, or the promise inherent in the latter. It's hard not to compare Asylum to Peregrine, given the obvious influence (aaaaaand the fact that I read them back-to-back), but they actually provide an interesting set of contrasting misses. On the one hand, Peregrine, while ultimately not the tone or genre I was expecting, is competently-written, and delivers well enough on the premise that it eventually settles on. Asylum, on the other hand, is exactly what it says on the tin, but is unsuccessful at achieving literally anything it set out to accomplish, because it is terribly written. 
 True story: I actually considered jumping ship from Peregrine to Asylum right around the time I realized that it was going to become X-Men Babies, BUT, after reading through a thirty-page sample of Asylum on break, I sat my ass right back down. 
 I was not prepared for the kind of prose Asylum was selling. The writing is so bad, you guys. It's bad in like every possible way. It's technically terrible - there's not a single thought, action, or motivation that goes untold when it should be shown, and oh god there is so much exposition. It's got terrible pacing and plotting, which ends up shafting the characterization. It's terribly bland, with no deft wordsmithing or clever turn of phrase to engage you. The research is shoddy at best, and the world-building reads like a child's conception of the ~scariest thing evarrr~. But worst of all for a horror novel, there's absolutely no atmosphere. It's not scary. 
 It's that last part that completely breaks this novel. Horror shit lives and dies on its ability to draw you in, to set a mood, and YA horror novels even more so, I'd expect, since they generally can't rely on gritty shock tactics or explicit gore to bully a reaction out of you. There has to be tension, there has to be suspense, there has to be mystery, or some magical combination of the three for this thing to accomplish its most basic function: scare me. Despite a decent conceptual basis - I mean, hello, haunted mental institution, Asylum just couldn't accomplish that. 
 So, ok, not creepy. But there's still a plot, right? Well, yeah, kind of. Except it's a really, really thin plot that would probably work better with fewer pages to fill. Even this short-ass novel has too much time for it to handle, I guess, so the book just goes wild with plot threads that end up meaning nothing, at least in this installment, just to run the meter out. 
 Seriously, there is so much crap in here that doesn't amount to anything. Entire characters and subplots prove to be extraneous, and I strongly suspect that they're thrown in there just to function as red herrings, to distract you from the most obvious conclusion by providing a handful of horror movie cliches for you to choose from. 
 The ultimate conflict only manages to separate itself from the bevy of potential conflicts in the last quarter or so of the novel, and it doesn't hold the focus of the book long enough to build any tension. We're swept along from twist to twist in the last few chapters without being made to care. The climax is predictable, given the few possible options, and I think it tries to wrap up the handful of subplots that have been playing out simultaneously, but they don't come together well at all. The reveal behind the big bad's motivation - which he is kind enough to monologue for us, by the way - feels contrived, a mish-mash of supernatural and human threat that only seems to serve the backstory delivery method and the ~shocking antagonist reveal~ for our MC. 
 So, the plot's a bust, the writing's a bust, how about the characters? Well, we're three for three, because they're shallow caricatures who behave wildly inconsistently and get shortchanged by the narrative. Our protagonist, Dan, is really young-sounding - again, we're talking like middle-grade writing level here - and his romance with love interest Abby is just shoved in there and barely developed. Jordan, the third bff, contributes absolutely nothing to the main plot, and both side characters actually have Distracting Subplots That Go Nowhere. Abby's, at least, gets a resolution, even if its significance is never made clear, but Jordan's subplot is terrible, eating up a shitload of page-time before disappearing when it's time to end the book, with no explanation whatsoever. I assume it's mostly if not all set-up for the sequel, but, as with the rest of the novel, the execution is shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. 
 I guess I should at least mention that Abby his Hispanic and Jordan is gay, but honestly they get so goddamn little to do here, that cookie might be best left in its wrapper. 
 So, bad characters, bad writing, bad plot, what's left? OH YEAH, the gimmick. That couldn't possibly also be tacked-on and (word of the night) extraneous, could it? 
 If you thought Peregrine's creepy photography was shoehorned in, Asylum's is ten times worse... 
 Read complete review at You're Killing.Us