From the tricksy, unstable terrain of Fen, her debut collection, through the Booker-shortlisted Everything Under, to the darkly gothic drama of her 2020 novel Sisters, Daisy Johnson’s fiction has long bumped up against the edges of horror. She has deployed the tropes and played with the imagery, but always left the reader with a way out – the option to interpret her work as magical realism, or psychological drama. The Hotel is different. In this new book of short stories, she fully, deliciously commits to the genre, via a series of brief, chilling tales of ghosts and witches, monsters and manifestations; rooms that change shape and “footsteps close behind you but no one there when you turn”.
The connective tissue is The Hotel of the title: nameless throughout, but always capitalised; looming over every sentence in which it appears. The stories take us back through The Hotel’s history: its ill-starred construction; the people who are drawn to and undone by it; the semi-sentience that roils and twitches within its walls. In Johnson’s work, landscapes have always set the tone and powered the action, and The Hotel is no exception: the flat, wet land of the Fens dampens its walls and sucks at its foundations, refusing readers firm footing. The building itself, with its “long chimneys, narrow windows … stained glass which dims the light”, has shouldered its way up from the site of a farm in which, many years earlier, a woman lived and died. We learn in the opening story that the woman was guilty of the dual sins of childlessness and second sight, which led her neighbours to drown her in the farm’s pond. Her ghost goes on to haunt The Hotel – most clearly via the eerie repetition of the phrase “I WILL SEE YOU SOON”, which she scratches on her door in the minutes before her murder, and which resurfaces throughout the collection on walls and mirrors and in notepads and emails – but she is not the source of its curse. Rather, it is the land itself that is haunted. “What is in this land is some possessive quality, some unquietness,” says the woman. “It is clear to me that there are places which have as much personality as any person or animal and this is one of them.”
After her drowning, the farm is burned down and the land sits, sodden and empty, until a construction crew arrives at the “slick, miserable place” to wrestle it into submission. Gradually, grudgingly, the land loosens its grip and The Hotel takes shape, and for some people, in some lights, that shape seems good: there are “big fires in the bar and the rooms are warm, dressing gowns hang from the backs of the bathroom doors”. But for other people, The Hotel acts like a hurtful magnet, dragging them ineluctably towards itself – and once it has them in its orbit, it is reluctant to let them go. The Hotel, we learn, is “an unclear archive, a great collector”; those it touches once are haunted by it, compelled to return. A girl falls into a queasy friendship with the child of another guest, and does something so terrible to her that, when she reappears as a grown woman in a later story, she rationalises it as a dream. But “when [a] job came up at The Hotel I found myself applying without really meaning to … it feels right to be back here in a way I cannot quite explain”. In an earlier tale, the women who clean The Hotel leave at the end of their shifts, but wake from sleep to find themselves “stood outside of The Hotel, waiting”.
Johnson’s Hotel is a palimpsest: layers of earth and history, and the intersecting lives of its victims, have piled up together to form it. As we move through the collection, we come to understand that it is a palimpsest of previous tales, too. The echoes of other giants of the genre – Stephen King’s The Shining, most obviously, but also Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Bluebeard, The Blair Witch Project, Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom and even Hansel and Gretel – resonate throughout, deepening and complicating it. In The Hotel, Johnson has given us a deftly constructed new version of a horror collection, with stories that slip in like mist under the door, just right for Halloween. But like all the best horror stories, they have deep roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted.
• The Hotel by Daisy Johnson is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
