This blog is a book review appreciation account now. Hey, I don’t make the rules! Okay, I do – and I’d like to start publishing book reviews. My personal goal/resolution for 2020 is to spend less time online (doing a great job so far!) and more time reading for fun. I’ve always loved to read (I was definitely that kid who packed at least four or five books into my backpack to take with me on 30-minute runs to the grocery store with my mom, because what if I needed to read them all at that exact moment??) and I’m trying to stretch my creative muscles and really challenge myself to improve my own writing. I can’t think of a better way to do than to simply read more. Plus, I love book reviews, and I’ve long wanted to try my hand at writing them myself, but unfortunately, books coverage is a dying beat in the journalism world.
While I’m not sure if I’m going to go with a specific theme for book reviews (only women, or only the classics, only literary fiction, etc.), I’d like to expand my book-reading horizons – lately I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers and romance novels, which I love – and I’m going to try and hit a goal of reading 100 books in 2020. Not sure if that’s too ambitious, but we’ll see!
I’m going to start with the first book I read in 2020, which was The Sun-Down Motel, by Simone St. James. [MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!]
I’ve never read any of her other books, but after reading this one, I can officially say I’m hooked – and you will be too, if you’re not already.
The Sun-Down Motel starts by striking a kind of quiet fear into its reader’s heart: “The night it all ended, Vivian was alone.” From that first sentence, the book sets off on down a tense, tautly woven trail that’s part traditional ghost story, part of crime thriller, part feminist manifesto, and 100 percent heart-poundingly suspenseful to the last page.
The story jumps between time periods and perspectives: that of Vivian, who’s 20 years old in 1982, and her niece, Carly, in 2017. Vivian and her niece have more in common than they know: They’re both feeling a little adrift – Viv by her parents’ divorce and Carly by her mother’s death – and they’re both running away from home and toward something – though what, neither of them know.
In 1982, Vivian lands at the Sun-Down Motel in the (fictional) small town of Fell accidentally after a hitchhiking scare and finds that they’re hiring a night clerk. Despite the fact that something is clearly off with the hotel, she’s drawn to the place and takes the job. It doesn’t take her long to realize that the hotel is haunted by (among others) the ghost of Betty, a young woman who was murdered and dumped at the hotel. Vivian quickly realizes that Betty isn’t the only woman to go missing in Fell and finds herself asking: Why does Fell have so many dead girls? And why doesn’t anyone seem to care? Determined to bring Betty’s killer to justice, Viv circles closer to the answer. Then one night, she disappears without a trace.
35 years later, 20-year-old Carly wakes up one day after the recent death of her mother, drops out of college, and starts driving east to figure out what happened to her aunt Viv. She finds herself at the Sun-Down where not much has changed – in fact, the hotel’s owner is, conveniently enough, looking for a night clerk. Of course, Carly takes the job, and, along with her new friend and roommate Heather, gets to work re-tracing Viv’s last steps in an attempt to discover the truth about her aunt. She soon realizes the same thing Viv did: Girls go missing in Fell. The question is, why? And what really happened to them?
Okay, I’ll try to stop with the spoilers there.
Jumping between timelines doesn’t always work as a literary device – it can be confusing, heavy-handed, or lazy – but in this case, the fact that we see Carly re-living her aunt’s last days and stepping into her shoes at her old job creates an “atmosphere of spooky isolation that feels vaguely gothic,” as blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books phrased it. It also provides a nagging sense of deja vu that’s in some ways scarier than the ghosts who hang around the hotel. Women go missing, are assaulted, are murdered, are abused, are mistreated all the time, not just in fictional Fell, and the struggle to make people care, especially when you’re not the “right kind” of victim, can feel insurmountable, as Vivian notes. “If you’re bad, if you’re shitty, this could happen to you.”
That deja vu filled me with a sense of dread – I kept bracing for what I thought was coming – but it also tinged the book with a heartbreaking, melancholy air. It was hard to see Carly heading down the same road as her aunt, especially when St. James makes clear how little the police cared about Viv’s disappearance the first time around. It was easy to feel like things weren’t going to change.
St. James also blurs the line between the supernatural and the real world in a way that reminds the reader that the scariest ghosts aren’t always the ones from your childhood horror stories – they’re the flesh-and-blood monsters you deal with every day, the ones smiling blandly at you in the store, at the post office, when you check into your hotel. Maybe you even live right next door to them. Yes, some of the literal ghosts hanging around the Sun-Down have their own unfinished business, but, like any other regulars at a hotel, Carly and Viv are able to get to know them – their personalities and quirks, their likes and dislikes. It’s the people of Fell who are cagey about the past, who hold their secrets tight to their chest and refuse to let go, first with Viv, and then with Carly.
That’s what makes the ending so satisfying, though. The book is in part a revenge fantasy – the ending isn’t necessarily realistic, but it’s cathartic as hell to read, and it’s heartwarming to see the female characters band together to solve the mysteries of Fell. Ultimately, The Sun-Down Motel is a deftly written, poignant, story that will stay with you for long after you’ve finished reading it.