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The Sun Down Motel - Simone St James
Well, that sure was a book. That I read.
The tl;dr gist of it: in 1982, a young woman, Viv, working as an all-night motel clerk in a small town in rural New York goes missing, along with a string of other young women in the town she lives in. In 2017, her niece Carly shows up to try to find out what happened to her, and soon begins to realize the motel is haunted.
The eeriness and ambiance of the motel is genuinely really fun - not outright horrifying, but tense and creepy - as is the general sense of the motel and the town never having really moved on much from the 80s. And the mystery was interesting enough to keep me reading, with the layered mysteries of Viv trying to solve the other girls' murders in the 1980s and her niece trying to solve theirs and hers in the modern day.
Eventually, though, it all ended up in a 7-car coincidence and bad decision pile-up.
So just to get this out of the way: Viv's not dead, she killed a guy (the serial killer who committed the other murders), faked her death, and spent the last 30 years living in the same small town where she was a motel clerk, but as a different person. Viv not being dead is a perfectly fine reveal - I figured it out a while before the characters did, but it's not *that* obvious - but Viv living her entire life in the same town she motel-clerked in was like ... her disappearance was a big deal! It was in the NEWSPAPERS! Even if Viv having a job that brings her into contact with the public wasn't bad enough, surely someone would have noticed that this was a person who'd had her picture in the paper! (Also as someone who lives in a town that is more like small-city sized than actual small town - Fairbanks is like 80K people - you run into people you know EVERYWHERE. I see former co-workers and classmates at the grocery store all the time. People 100% will see her.)
IIRC, she left for a couple of years and then came back because "The town just draws you back if you're meant to be here." Or maybe you could be drawn to a place that wasn't where the worst night of your life happened and also everyone knows you! Come onnnnnn.
The other thing about her disappearance that made me stare at the ceiling for a bit was the absolute pile-up of how she just happened to get everything she needed to vanish on that exact night, including a convenient envelope stuffed with cash that a blackmailer stopped by the motel to pick up but ended up leaving without getting it. Or the amiable pot dealer who dealt out of her motel who knew exactly how to get her bulletproof ID documents in small-town rural NY in 1982 ...
The envelope of cash was what really broke me, though. The minute she stuffed it into her bra it is incredibly obvious that this is how a broke motel clerk is going to disappear and also - show of hands for everyone who's worked a low-wage service job and just had someone spontaneously hand you a fat envelope of cash that no one was going to claim! Nobody? Really?
I think it also just bothered me unreasonably that the hauntings in the hotel didn't stop when the murderer was killed in 1982, but rather, after the 2017 protagonist figured everything out. There's a nice haunted-house moment at the end where the motel, no longer haunted, suddenly starts appearing as the decrepit, condemned building that it actually is, full of mold and water damage; it's essentially been held in stasis since the original murders. Maybe the murderer's body needed to be found in the modern-day subplot so his ghost could show up at the motel so his victims could resolve things with him? But he literally died at the motel! I don't need everything in a ghost story to make sense, I just want a little more of a stab at the underlying Ghost Logic than this.
There were a lot of little random things that annoyed me, such as:
- Carly's roommate in the modern-day subplot, a ditherheaded caricature of a millennial. She has anxiety! And takes meds! And none of that impacts her life in any meaningful way whatsoever! She is just such a cliche; she has Conditions and Meds (we're never told what these are) and she is Morbid and Likes True Crime and I'm capitalizing all of this stuff because it feels more like check boxes on some kind of Today's Youth checklist than like an actual coherent character. And then she misses the climax of the book because she can't handle the mental strain of Carly's investigation and goes to stay with her parents for a while.
- Carly discovers the murderer's hidden-since-1982 body because one of the people who helped Viv hide it is a former private investigator who gave her a large stack of surveillance photos of the motel that also happened to include several photos she took of the place where they hid the body, from several different angles, so that she (the photographer) could find it again. WHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. It's not even like, a random patch of field or something. It's an abandoned barn that she (or one of the other small group of conspirators who helped Viv hide the body, I forget now) suggested as a hiding place because she knew that the owner had gone into a retirement home recently. So she knows exactly where it is. WHY WOULD YOU TAKE PHOTOS OF IT. (Other than to provide a clue thirty years later.)
- I could also start complaining about the romance subplot but honestly that was just so baffling I don't even know where to start. It felt like it dropped in from a whole different genre.
- Also, with the motel so _obviously_ haunted, how is it that the whole town doesn't know it's haunted? Why does literally anyone stay here? At this point I think I'm starting to overthink it and I'm just going to post this.
The tl;dr gist of it: in 1982, a young woman, Viv, working as an all-night motel clerk in a small town in rural New York goes missing, along with a string of other young women in the town she lives in. In 2017, her niece Carly shows up to try to find out what happened to her, and soon begins to realize the motel is haunted.
The eeriness and ambiance of the motel is genuinely really fun - not outright horrifying, but tense and creepy - as is the general sense of the motel and the town never having really moved on much from the 80s. And the mystery was interesting enough to keep me reading, with the layered mysteries of Viv trying to solve the other girls' murders in the 1980s and her niece trying to solve theirs and hers in the modern day.
Eventually, though, it all ended up in a 7-car coincidence and bad decision pile-up.
So just to get this out of the way: Viv's not dead, she killed a guy (the serial killer who committed the other murders), faked her death, and spent the last 30 years living in the same small town where she was a motel clerk, but as a different person. Viv not being dead is a perfectly fine reveal - I figured it out a while before the characters did, but it's not *that* obvious - but Viv living her entire life in the same town she motel-clerked in was like ... her disappearance was a big deal! It was in the NEWSPAPERS! Even if Viv having a job that brings her into contact with the public wasn't bad enough, surely someone would have noticed that this was a person who'd had her picture in the paper! (Also as someone who lives in a town that is more like small-city sized than actual small town - Fairbanks is like 80K people - you run into people you know EVERYWHERE. I see former co-workers and classmates at the grocery store all the time. People 100% will see her.)
IIRC, she left for a couple of years and then came back because "The town just draws you back if you're meant to be here." Or maybe you could be drawn to a place that wasn't where the worst night of your life happened and also everyone knows you! Come onnnnnn.
The other thing about her disappearance that made me stare at the ceiling for a bit was the absolute pile-up of how she just happened to get everything she needed to vanish on that exact night, including a convenient envelope stuffed with cash that a blackmailer stopped by the motel to pick up but ended up leaving without getting it. Or the amiable pot dealer who dealt out of her motel who knew exactly how to get her bulletproof ID documents in small-town rural NY in 1982 ...
The envelope of cash was what really broke me, though. The minute she stuffed it into her bra it is incredibly obvious that this is how a broke motel clerk is going to disappear and also - show of hands for everyone who's worked a low-wage service job and just had someone spontaneously hand you a fat envelope of cash that no one was going to claim! Nobody? Really?
I think it also just bothered me unreasonably that the hauntings in the hotel didn't stop when the murderer was killed in 1982, but rather, after the 2017 protagonist figured everything out. There's a nice haunted-house moment at the end where the motel, no longer haunted, suddenly starts appearing as the decrepit, condemned building that it actually is, full of mold and water damage; it's essentially been held in stasis since the original murders. Maybe the murderer's body needed to be found in the modern-day subplot so his ghost could show up at the motel so his victims could resolve things with him? But he literally died at the motel! I don't need everything in a ghost story to make sense, I just want a little more of a stab at the underlying Ghost Logic than this.
There were a lot of little random things that annoyed me, such as:
- Carly's roommate in the modern-day subplot, a ditherheaded caricature of a millennial. She has anxiety! And takes meds! And none of that impacts her life in any meaningful way whatsoever! She is just such a cliche; she has Conditions and Meds (we're never told what these are) and she is Morbid and Likes True Crime and I'm capitalizing all of this stuff because it feels more like check boxes on some kind of Today's Youth checklist than like an actual coherent character. And then she misses the climax of the book because she can't handle the mental strain of Carly's investigation and goes to stay with her parents for a while.
- Carly discovers the murderer's hidden-since-1982 body because one of the people who helped Viv hide it is a former private investigator who gave her a large stack of surveillance photos of the motel that also happened to include several photos she took of the place where they hid the body, from several different angles, so that she (the photographer) could find it again. WHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. It's not even like, a random patch of field or something. It's an abandoned barn that she (or one of the other small group of conspirators who helped Viv hide the body, I forget now) suggested as a hiding place because she knew that the owner had gone into a retirement home recently. So she knows exactly where it is. WHY WOULD YOU TAKE PHOTOS OF IT. (Other than to provide a clue thirty years later.)
- I could also start complaining about the romance subplot but honestly that was just so baffling I don't even know where to start. It felt like it dropped in from a whole different genre.
- Also, with the motel so _obviously_ haunted, how is it that the whole town doesn't know it's haunted? Why does literally anyone stay here? At this point I think I'm starting to overthink it and I'm just going to post this.
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Ha, yes, this! I grew up in a town that size, and my dad used to joke that it was impossible to spend a day out and about without running into someone from work. Never mind years!
Disbelief: immediately unsuspended. *g*
I think it also just bothered me unreasonably that the hauntings in the hotel didn't stop when the murderer was killed in 1982, but rather, after the 2017 protagonist figured everything out.
I don't think that's unreasonable at all! That violates genre conventions pretty heavily, and you can do that, obviously, but it needs to be supported by the narrative, which it doesn't sound like this is at all.
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Well this part sounds great and cool!!
Everything else does not.
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That is good and, yes, could have mirrored nicely with the discovery of the body of the murderer, no longer a mysterious, potentially still active entity but a dude who has very definitely been dead in a barn for the last forty years.
The convenient envelope full of cash feels left over from someone who missed the point of Psycho.
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That is very frustrating. I can go a long way in a narrative on ambience, but I don't want the other fifty percent to be (in the real sense of narrative coherence, not people who use the term like it means anything that doesn't make sense to them) plot holes.
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There was a series I read where the protagonist turned out to be half-nonhuman (really nasty ones), but in a science-fictional, rather than fantasy way (parallel universes, immortals reproducing by binary fission, that sort of thing) and that carried the series nicely for several books.
And then suddenly the whole thing took a right-angle turn into fantasy, and it turned out that the protagonist and his brother were actually the reincarnation of Achilles and Patrocles, and had had multiple reincarnations, and I was left going "what just happened?". I think the publisher cancelled the last book, and I could see why.
Is there a specific literary term for this kind of thing?
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Is there a specific literary term for this kind of thing?
The closest thing to it I can think of is "breaking the contract with the reader," where the "contract" is basically that the author lets you know by tone, style, and setup what kind of story you're in, and implicitly will be violating the contract if they abruptly switch to a different kind of story halfway through. But I'm not sure if it's exactly the same thing.
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