Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem

I found this one last weekend while browsing at Barnes and Noble.  This is why the publishers are so concerned about keeping physical book stores open and not letting business shift even more to online purchasing - they believe that browsing in brick & mortar stores may lead you to happen upon their book.  Of course, online browsing also leads to chance discoveries of books, but the power of big publishers is in paper distribution - in online format, they're not at a significant advantage over small and self-publishers, so they are anxious to keep the paper distribution system going.  Which is fairly irrelevant to this review, actually, since Deadfall Hotel is from Solaris, who are a small publisher.  But the things that are going on right now in publishing and bookselling are very exciting, and the system is going through considerable upheaval, and I find it all very interesting.

On the other hand, I might not have found this book if I had been browsing online, because it was mis-shelved, in my opinion.  I found it in the science fiction and fantasy section, but this book is clearly more horror than fantasy.  I very rarely read horror, so it's unlikely it would have come up in the places I look at books online.  The protagonist is Richard Carter, a man who recently lost his wife in a house fire, though he managed to rescue their ten year old daughter, and he's currently unemployed and frozen by the grieving and guilt of losing his wife.  He applies for a job he sees advertised with very little description, and after an interview is offered the position as proprietor of the Deadfall Hotel.  He is hired by Jacob, the previous proprietor, who has now moved to the position of caretaker.

The Deadfall Hotel is is a huge, rambling, creepy place, in an isolated location, and with a strange clientele.  This isn't an unusual idea to fantasy readers, and I looked forward to Richard and Serena interacting with the building and with the guests.  I was rather disappointed, however.  Tem's focus in telling his story is very different than a fantasy writer's would be, and we do not get an account of their daily lives, or stories about the interesting guests they meet, or even particularly the sense of the hotel as a character itself. Tem doesn't seem very focused on telling us what it's like to live and work at Deadfall, instead he keeps leaping forward through time to describe various moments or events that are a bit unsettling or uncomfortable.  Richard has strange dreams and wanders around the hotel; Serena gets her period, which Richard finds threatening as he wants her to remain a little girl as long as possible; Richard and Jacob are doing some maintenance and a strange critter turns up.

In short, Tem neglects all the things I wanted to read about in favor of a very cold and distant narrative of unsettling moments.  They rarely interact with the guests, who supposedly take care of their own cleaning and meals, and often check in and out without passing the front desk.  There are mysterious, magical housekeepers who clean at night and are almost never seen.  Richard occasionally mentions guests he sees regularly, like a pair of old ladies who play badminton every day, but it's in passing, as if they aren't important.  And he's wrong, they are important -- that's what I wanted to read about, the interesting characters who pass through the place.

I was also very exasperated with Richard.  He's so useless, while at the same time obsessively trying to protect Serena from growing up because he wants her to remain a little girl.  Meanwhile his dead wife, Abby, is haunting the place and his dreams, and he can't bear the thought of leaving because how could he leave her behind?  And yet as time goes by he definitely falls out of love with Abby.  He relates more and more about her personality and their marriage that make her seem quite unlikeable, but then Richard is no catch, himself.  He is one seriously messed up loser, which is why he was qualified to work at the Deadfall in the first place.  And he's not even really all that good at it -- there is a section in the book when the hotel is overrun by something that's killing everything in its path, and it's understandable that his first concern is his daughter, but he never once spares a single thought for the well-being of their guests, and when he later learns that several of them were killed, he really doesn't care.  He clearly feels no responsibility as a proprietor should.

Even the creepy things mostly weren't, because the writing is so bloodless (save the for the constant mentions of the color red) and distant that I wasn't at all involved enough to care if they lived or died.  I cared about Jacob, and Enid, the cook, but not Richard and not particularly Serena, either.  But mostly I found it a rather frustrating and unsatisfying read.  It was also a slow read - it took me nearly a week to get through it, even though it's not a long book.  Contrast that with the book I'm currently reading, which is also horror - I expect I'll finish it in one day.  It grabbed me and engaged me and, even though it isn't as imaginative as Deadfall Hotel, it's a more successful book for me as a reader.

I wanted to like this, but I'm afraid that mostly this book felt like a wasted opportunity.  It has a great setting and some great possibilities, but it turned out to be stilted, cold, and grey.  What a disappointment.

Wycliffe and the Guild of Nine by W.J. Burley

I have trouble writing about books like this one.  It's a police procedural in an ongoing series (the author is now deceased) set in Cornwall that I've read quite a few of, and generally liked fairly well.  As such, it met my expectations while in no way being particularly outstanding.  It was okay, not great, kind of shallow but a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.  A lot of the mysteries I read could be described that way.

The book is a British import, copyright 2000.  Wycliffe is an older, senior detective who still likes getting directly involved in investigations and interviewing witnesses, though he could easily leave it to his team.  He is disgruntled and considers retiring because his department is getting a new head, and it's a woman!  Dun dun DUN!!  I find this attitude highly bizarre, probably because Britain has its own forms of sexism and they are somewhat different than the way it manifests in the US, so they sometimes are weird and surprising to me.  I suppose that a lot of older policemen who are used to things being a certain way have been uncomfortable with women in positions of authority, but still it disappointed me because I want to like Wycliff, and I think a good criminal investigator should be someone who keeps an open mind and makes decisions based on verifiable facts instead of assumptions and stereotypes.  To his credit, or perhaps Burley's, Wycliffe decides to wait and see how things go with the new boss before he decides whether to resign.

As for the mystery, it had the feel of the answer being pulled out of a hat.  There wasn't really any evidence pointing to the person they concluded was the killer, and the motivations assigned to him were quite weak.  This isn't an outstanding book, but it was sorta okay, which is what I find with a lot of series mysteries.

Mrs. Ames by EF Benson

EF Benson is the author of a series of novels about the cutthroat social maneuverings in small town England.  They are funny, and a TV series was even made out of them.  Those novels are Queen Lucia, Miss Mapp, Lucia in London, Mapp and Lucia, Lucia's Progress, and Trouble for Lucia.  I read most of them years ago and enjoyed them, though his main protagonist is Lucia, and my favorite of the series, Miss Mapp, is Lucia-free.  Mrs. Ames has been reissued, and was being offered in the Librarything Early Reviewers group.  I didn't get the book, but was interested enough to track it down, even paying what to my mind was a ridiculous price ($7) for an ebook of an obscure hundred-year-old novel.  Once again let me repeat my refrain: big publishers, die, die, die you bloodsucking bastards.  Anyway, onto the novel--

Mrs. Ames was a great disappointment to me.  It is quite different from the Lucia books, not nearly as funny and a lot more introspective.  We are introduced first to Mr. and Mrs. Altham, who dearly adore keeping up on all the local gossip.  Mrs. Altham is intrigued and scandalized to hear the the town's social queen bee, Mrs. Ames, is having a party at which she invited certain people to attend without their spouses.  The retired general, but not his wife.  The doctor's wife, but not the doctor.  It defies social convention, and Mrs. Altham (who would disapprove of absolutely anything if it were Mrs. Ames who thought of it, because she is jealous) predicts that it will lead to terrible things.  As it turns out, she was somewhat correct.

At the party, Major Ames and Harry (Mrs. and Major Ames's son) are both quite taken with Millie, the doctor's wife.  She is younger and prettier than most anyone else in their social circle at a mere 37 years old, and she has a manner which Major Ames finds absolutely charming.  Her manner mostly relies on agreeing with whatever anyone else says, in a very un-self-respecting way.  For instance: "Do tell me all about it," she said.  "Of course, I am only a woman, and we are supposed to have no brains, are we not?  And to be able to understand nothing about politics."  I, of course, took an instant dislike to her for being an idiot.  But Major Ames, who is certainly not a man with any depth of thought, was enchanted.  

Major Ames begins spending too much time with Millie, even though neither of them are really all that strongly attracted.  They're just bored, and discontented with their lives, and it gives them something to do.  Mrs. Ames, who isn't a fool, quickly becomes aware of the situation, and after first trying to make herself more attractive to recapture his husband's eye, she begins to occupy herself with more substantive matters, including the women's suffrage movement.  This leads to a big blowup when Major Ames perceives that she might have embarrassed him (since he rarely thinks of anyone but himself) and he decides to run away with Millie, whose husband is really a much better man than Major Ames, but she's just as stupid as he is.

Benson does not really portray any of his characters in a flattering light except Mrs. Ames, who undergoes a period of considerable personal growth.  He tells us that they are stupid or shallow or selfish, and mostly just bored and childish and lacking any strength of feeling at all.  But it made for very dull reading, by and large, to read about insipid people with insipid lives who can't even really admit what they're doing, and telling themselves stupid lies.  And unlike the Mapp & Lucia books, this novel was concerned almost exclusively with the internal lives of the characters.  We spend most of our time listening to Benson tell us about what the characters are thinking and feeling, and they're boring.  Respectable middle-aged people who are vaguely unhappy and discontented, wondering vaguely what to do about it.  Ugh.  And since Millie and the Major are seemingly incapable even of feeling anything in any way except vaguely, it's just an incredibly tedious trudge.  I think there is probably a good reason why the Mapp & Lucia novels have continued to be read, and this one has been forgotten.  It's tedious and forgettable.