The blurb for this book says that Coma is the book that brought Robin Cook fame and fortune. Unfortunately I found so much wrong with this book, both as he wrote the woman character and I feel that he had not yet mastered the art of storytelling of his later novels that I know and love.
Coma features a third year female medical school student by the name of Susan Wheeler. On her first day of her surgery rotation she sees a woman who is her age who is in a coma after a routine surgery. The doctors have no idea what caused it. After seeing another patient who exhibits the same bizarre symptoms Susan decides to investigate the coma cases further. What she discovers is a chilling scenario that is straight out of a sci fi novel. Well it IS a Sci-Fi medical thriller but you get my drift. There are good sci-fi and bad sci-fi’s and this fell into the latter category.
I tried hard to think of what Robin Cook did right in this novel and I couldn’t come up with anything. As a woman the way he wrote the woman in this book really pissed me off and that set the tone for the rest of the book. I can’t say if he did not take such a stereotypical view if my feelings would have been the same but I read the book with a mixture of anger and disdain.
His later works are a big improvement so don’t let this deter you from those. Just stay away from the books he published in the 70’s and 80’s.
