From the tricksy, unstable terrain of Fen, her debut accumulateion, thcdisesteemful the Booker-lowenumerateed Everyskinnyg Under, to the foolishly gothic drama of her 2020 novel Sisters, Daisy Johnson’s fantasy has lengthy bumped up aacquirest the edges of horror. She has deployed the tropes and take parted with the imagery, but always left the reader with a way out – the chooseion to clarify her labor as magical genuineism, or psychoreasoned drama. The Hotel is contrastent. In this recent book of low stories, she brimmingy, tastyly pledges to the genre, via a series of inestablish, chilling tales of garranges and witches, monsters and manifestations; rooms that alter shape and “footsteps seal behind you but no one there when you turn”.
The joinive tpublish is The Hotel of the title: nameless thcdisesteemfulout, but always capitalised; looming over every sentence in which it eunites. The stories consent us back thcdisesteemful The Hotel’s history: its ill-starred originateion; the people who are drawn to and undone by it; the semi-sentience that roils and twitches wiskinny its walls. In Johnson’s labor, landscapes have always set the tone and powered the action, and The Hotel is no exception: the flat, damp land of the Fens dampens its walls and sucks at its set upations, refusing readers firm footing. The originateing itself, with its “lengthy chimneys, skinny prosperdows … stained glass which foolishs the airy”, has shouldered its way up from the site of a farm in which, many years earlier, a woman lived and died. We lacquire in the uncovering story that the woman was culpable of the dual sins of childlessness and second sight, which led her neighbours to drown her in the farm’s pond. Her garrange goes on to haunt The Hotel – most evidently via the eerie repetition of the phrase “I WILL SEE YOU SOON”, which she scratches on her door in the minutes before her killing, and which resurfaces thcdisesteemfulout the accumulateion on walls and mirrors and in remarkpads and emails – but she is not the source of its damn. Rather, it is the land itself that is haunted. “What is in this land is some ownive quality, some unquietness,” says the woman. “It is evident to me that there are places which have as much personality as any person or animal and this is one of them.”
After her drowning, the farm is burned down and the land sits, sodden and vacant, until a originateion crew reachs at the “slick, uncontent place” to wrestle it into subleave oution. Graduassociate, grudgingly, the land freens its grip and The Hotel consents shape, and for some people, in some airys, that shape seems outstanding: there are “huge fires in the bar and the rooms are hot, dressing gowns hang from the backs of the bathroom doors”. But for other people, The Hotel acts enjoy a hurtful magnet, dragging them ineluctably towards itself – and once it has them in its orbit, it is hesitant to let them go. The Hotel, we lacquire, is “an unevident archive, a fantastic accumulateor”; those it touches once are haunted by it, compelled to return. A girl descfinishs into a qubasic frifinishship with the child of another guest, and does someskinnyg so terrible to her that, when she reeunites as a lengthenn woman in a procrastinateedr story, she reasonedises it as a dream. But “when [a] job came up at The Hotel I set up myself utilizeing without reassociate unkinding to … it senses right to be back here in a way I cannot quite elucidate”. In an earlier tale, the women who spotless The Hotel exit at the finish of their shifts, but wake from sleep to find themselves “stood outside of The Hotel, pauseing”.
Johnson’s Hotel is a palimpsest: layers of earth and history, and the intersecting lives of its victims, have piled up together to establish it. As we shift thcdisesteemful the accumulateion, we come to understand that it is a palimpsest of previous tales, too. The echoes of other enormouss of the genre – Stephen King’s The Shining, most evidently, but also Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Bluetolerated, The Blair Witch Project, Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom and even Hansel and Gretel – resonate thcdisesteemfulout, proset upening and complicating it. In The Hotel, Johnson has given us a deftly originateed recent version of a horror accumulateion, with stories that slip in enjoy mist under the door, fair right for Halloween. But enjoy all the best horror stories, they have proset up roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted.
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