“A curtain of gnarled skeleton oak and pine hides it from the rest of the world. The hotel is not well-lit, there is no sign, and night comes early here. The main highway bypassed its access road nearly half a century ago. From the air…the hotel appears to follow the jumbled lines of a train wreck, cars thrown out at all angles and yet still attached in sequence.”
Excerpted from the opening paragraph of Steve Rasnic Tem’s Deadfall Hotel, the preceding is an apt and vivid description of the establishment that lies at the heart, literally and figuratively, of this fine novel from Centipede Press.
The novel’s jacket copy bills the book as “reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and combining the atmosphere of Edward Gorey with the phantasmagoric richness of setting found in Mervyn Peake.” Personally, I see much more Gorey and Peake than I do Bradbury, with a strong helping of Charlie Grant, to whom Tem dedicates the book. But you can make up your own mind, since I will be quoting Tem extensively in this review.
Deadfall Hotel is ostensibly the story of Richard Carter and his daughter Serena, who are still trying to regain their equilibrium following the relatively recent death of wife and mother Abby, whose ghost has accompanied them to the Hotel. But the real star here is the Hotel itself, which via Tem’s lush descriptions comes to halting, shambling life:
“Richard wasn’t listening to him. There were other sounds to hear. There was the soft inner breath that drifted through the Deadfall, higher pitched in the halls, dropping lower in the stairs and secret passages. There was the light tapping of guests who never left their rooms, their frenetic thoughts in tune with that breath. There was the distant crying of a white wolf with dying eyes. And there was the nearly inaudible laughter of his wife, his beautiful wife Abby, growing madder with every passing day of her death.”
Richard and Serena’s tale is interspersed with pithy observations from the journal of Jacob Ascher, the prior manager of the Deadfall, who recruited and hired Richard as his replacement, and has stayed on to provide prolonged training for Richard. An example from Jacob’s journal:
“We cannot escape our fears. Ultimately we must deal with them. We are but momentary blips of consciousness on the sea of time — we have but a limited time to do those things we are willing to do, to say those things we are willing to say. Our greatest challenge may be to face the sadness that knowledge entails. I’m afraid it is a test most of us will fail.”
And:
“I never imagined that training a replacement would prove to be so difficult. I find I have increased respect for what my own predecessors must have gone through. It is a delicate balance managing a new member of our family — we want him to be able to act independently, and yet we also want him to do what we want. Prospective managers are selected from a pool of the traumatized, the wounded and damaged. And yet we expect them to be brave…
“When I look at Richard Carter, I see a frozen man, stilled by grief and impossible dilemma. How can he protect his daughter? How can he leave his wife behind a second time? …. Perhaps we expect too much.”
If there’s a complaint to be had with Deadfall Hotel, it’s that, at the end of the day, precious little actually happens. The book is more a character study — of Richard, Serena, Jacob and, of course, the Hotel — than anything else, and while the events that do occur help to shape the trajectory of Richard and Serena’s lives post-Abby, those events are somewhat few and far between. The major plot points involve Serena’s adoption of a stray kitten, which turns out to be far more than just a cat; the arrival of a shape-shifting guest who, in the twilight days of his life has lost the fine-grained control he formerly held over his nature; and the annual foray by a large religious-revival group, the head of whom has some rather dire personal problems that he refuses to face. Each of these makes for an interesting sub-plot, although at least one seems drawn out beyond comfortably-sustainable levels.
The book is rounded out by the novelette “Blood Wolf,” the original, stand-alone version of one section of the novel, and the short story “Skullbees,” also set in the Deadfall universe. All in all, I can heartily recommend an extended stay in the dark and distinctive confines of the Deadfall Hotel.
- CROGIAN - August 17, 2013
- Dark Dreams, Pale Horses - November 25, 2012
- Black Horse and Other Strange Stories - August 13, 2012
- Sudden Death Overtime - August 13, 2012
- Pray to Stay Dead - August 13, 2012
- Acheron - August 13, 2012
- The Female of the Species - August 13, 2012
- Deadfall Hotel - April 17, 2012
- Terra Damnata - April 17, 2012
- Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares: A Biography of Herbert van Thal - November 9, 2011
