Review: "The Third Hotel" by Laura Van Den Berg

By coincidence I came across and article today talking about Laura Van Den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel, as a literary noir novel. That is partially true in retrospect. It shares many themes of a classic noir tale: it’s sunny setting that belies hidden fissures of one person’s waking world and the depersonalization of a someone on the brink of a mental collapse. But while I was reading it, I could not escape its roots as a horror story, one where the biggest monster is the unknown (when is it ever not?) and ghosts are just people whose souls have left their walking, talking bodies. This slim, 209-page novel is a perfect representation of these two genres and what inexorably links them together. Noir relies on horror as a feeling and at the center of every horror story is a kind of mystery that, if and when it is revealed, shows the true, ugly monster hiding at the center of the unknown, both concepts that this book plays around with in brilliant and sometimes cruel ways, exposing our lonesome status in growing society and the idea that we can only rely on ourselves is the thing that scares us the most. Clare (I’m making the argument right now that this could or could not be her real name) is feeling such a way following the death of her husband Richard. Whether it is curiosity, grief or the numb feeling she can’t quite shake, she heads down to Havana, Cuba to attend a film festival featuring the world premiere of Cuba’s first big budgeted horror film, which is about zombies. Her husband was a horror film scholar, while she was a travel writer focusing on the history of the elevator. She takes in the sights of Havana, forms little, temporary friendships with a few of the people she meets and one day, at random, she spots Richard wearing a suit he would never wear and smoking a cigar which he never did while he was alive. I won’t reveal what happens after this, but it is the moment I talked about earlier where Clare’s mind begins to fracture. She starts seeing eels crawling across her skin (a scene from the zombie film), her interactions with those around her start to possess a sharpened edge of menace and once she misses her flight back to the states, her journey produces more questions than it does answers, although Clare and us as readers, are fearful of what those answers might be. This book is not the kind to give them away and it is more powerful for it. Much like I’m Thinking of ending Things, this story, its present and its past, like the couple’s awkward meeting, Clare’s early life when her parent’s ran a seaside motel and her strange stays in motels, where friendly receptionists named Samantha and a fingernail found in a drawer take on chilling dimensions, all seem to exist within the consciousness of s doomed, unreliable character. It makes for a hypnotic and creepy book, tinged with feelings of sadness regret and longing that linger long after the book is finished. 

Rating: 5/5