“Above all, do no harm.” Failure to heed the physician’s imperative is at the centre of Michelle Butler Hallett’s harrowing debut novel, the story of a well-intentioned doctor’s attempt to act as a moral compass at a covert weapons research facility masquerading as a psychiatric centre in the early 1970s.

Despite his instinctive decency, young Dr. Bozeman is ambitious. “We can rewrite these men’s minds,” he says of his first subjects, a group of Vietnam vets suffering terrible post-traumatic stress disorder. Bozeman uses electroconvulsive therapy “to rid the brain of debris,” but he is told, by one of his officers, that “the debris of society can give us something back.”

Bozeman is a doctor, but he is also an American soldier – he follows orders. He is recruited to SHIP – the Society for Human Improvement and Potential – which runs a program in Newfoundland that primarily treats autistic children. Bozeman soon finds himself experimenting on them in an attempt to tap latent psychic ability.

Hallett’s own weapons are subtly deployed in this convincing human drama. Her characters are thorough and striking, and her book is replete with aspects of horror, mystery, and hospital thriller, while transcending the conventions of mere genre. The descriptions of medical procedures are impressive in their detail, but the book avoids “going textbook” on the reader. In fact, Hallett’s voice often surprisingly, pleasantly veers to the poetic. The Vietnam vets are described as “each rotting in his own illness.” Giving electroconvulsive therapy to one terrified kid, Bozeman discovers, within the child’s psyche, “some brittle landscape, hard fruit on the ground.”

Both Bozeman and Hallett dare to go beyond the accepted – in both cases, to impressively terrifying results.