The Hotel by Daisy Johnson Review

Haunted hotel gonna haunt!

That’s basically the premise and the entirety of Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel. It looks like a short story collection - 14 stories (all impressively almost exactly the same length each) about this creepy hotel, some of which loosely tie into one another, to create a novel(ish).

Except, all Johnson’s half-baked, boring stories did was remind me of the best haunted hotel novel, The Shining. A couple of creepy little girls, the forbidden room (here it’s room 63 instead of room 237), the foreboding message repeated throughout (here it’s I Will Be There Soon instead of Redrum), people becoming unable to leave the hotel, people going crazy, people dying, the hotel being alive, etc.

When it wasn’t make me want to re-read The Shining, it was reminding me of other better horror stories. The hotel is bigger on the inside than on the outside (like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House), a film about an exorcist was filmed at the hotel in the ‘70s (the details of which resemble The Exorcist), and there’s even a found footage chapter that was straight out of The Blair Witch Project.

A few of the stories have women as the victims, and Johnson was possibly going for a “women haunted by the past/trauma/something vaguely feminist” angle, but it’s not well-realised here. I’m not at all sure what she was trying to put across with these stories and that unimpressiveness suffuses the text. And forget scaring the reader - Johnson hasn’t got the imagination for that. All she can do is regurgitate other, more original creators’ imagery.

Haunted houses (or hotels in this instance) are my favourite subgenre of horror and I think Johnson set up the groundwork for a potentially decent haunted building story - the problem is that that’s all she does. Because there’s no great story arc or memorable characters - just one short story after another underlining how spooky the spooky hotel is, which feels like an extended opening part of a larger story - and then it ends with no payoff. I would say it was anticlimactic but it didn’t feel like it was building up to a climax in the first place.

Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel is less a novel (or short story collection) and more of a barely developed premise that goes nowhere and overall feels very unsatisfying and instantly forgettable. A poor addition to the haunted house canon.