Aces of Weird: The Hotel (Daisy Johnson, 2024)
Checking into a labyrinth of terrors
Cover art by Jialun Deng, design by Suzanne Dean
The Hotel existed long before it was built. Its doors open into places unexpected. Staying in Room 63 is not advised. The Hotel has a way of concealing itself, but you’ll have no trouble finding your way there. Those who visit rarely visit by choice. Things disappear in The Hotel. Things return. We’ll be at The Hotel soon.
Booker shortlister Daisy Johnson’s fourteen-tale anthology chronicles the brief and beguiling history of a liminal Travelodge mired in the Anglian fens, from construction to conflagration. The stories are uniformly bijou, like hotel apartments themselves, sometimes discreetly connected, resonating with echoes of past events. The Hotel is a TARDIS of strange, beautifully built, masterfully subtle, exquisitely weird…
