Shutter Island

Dennis Lehane comes from a working class background in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents are Irish immigrants, and he grew up in Boston where he attended public school. After graduating high school, Lehane studied at Eckerd College and then went on to get an MFA in creative writing at Florida International University. In 1994, Lehane published his first novel, A Drink Before the War. It was a largely successful debut that put Lehane on the map. He quickly followed it up with Darkness, Take My Hand and Sacred in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Then, in 1998, Lehane published his first notable work, Gone Baby Gone, which Ben Affleck adapted into a film in 2007. Over the next five years, Lehane published his other most famous novels, Mystic River (2001) and Shutter Island (2003). Clint Eastwood directed an adaptation of Mystic River in 2003 and Martin Scorsese adapted Shutter Island in 2010. Following these successes, Lehane continued to write consistently, generally releasing a novel every other year. He published his latest book, Small Mercies, on April 25, 2023. Most of his novels are mysteries and thrillers, and most of them take place in Boston.

Shutter Island alludes to many of the most important events of the 20th century, including World War II and the Cold War. Teddy is a World War II veteran, and in one scene, he recalls his experience while liberating Dachau. Dachau was a Nazi concentration camp located in southern Germany. It was one of the first camps the Nazis constructed and became the site of the deaths of 32,000 people, most of whom were Jewish. Meanwhile, the Cold War, which is raging during the time Shutter Island takes place, is mentioned more broadly. The Cold War was a conflict that occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the second half of the 20th century. Primarily, the Cold War was a nuclear arms race and involved acts of espionage and psychological warfare more than anything else. The Cold War led to large-scale feelings of paranoia among the United States populace, which also made its way into many of the films and books made during the time. Although Lehane wrote Shutter Island after the Cold War, he recreates the atmosphere of paranoia that was present at the time and takes advantage of it to craft the twists and turns of his narrative.

Shutter Island owes a heavy debt to gothic fiction. Gothic fiction emerged in 1764 with The Castle of Otranto and includes landmark books such as Frankenstein (1818), Wuthering Heights (1847), and Rebecca (1938). Trademarks of gothic fiction include melodramatic plots, dark and mysterious atmospheres, and depictions of insanity. These tropes all exist in Shutter Island, which takes place on a decaying and isolated island and features a number of characters suffering from severe mental illness. Other contemporary examples of Gothic fiction include The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Additionally, Shutter Island is a thriller, a genre that combines the subgenres of horror, detective fiction, and crime fiction. Thrillers are some of the most popular books in contemporary American fiction. Examples include Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and Stephen King’s Misery.