Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Full disclosure: I have not finished Deadfall Hotel yet, and the only reason I was even going to try and finish was for the sake of writing this review. I was struggling to read it last week, and skipped last Monday’s review, and I fear the same will happen again today, unless I just get my thoughts down, finally. I don’t expect there to be anything in the last 20 pages that will change my impressions much. Simply put: awful book.
Now, that’s just my opinion, of course, and you should read others’ reviews, because some people liked the novel. They were intrigued by the setting, as was I, initially, intrigued by some of the characters. But Deadfall Hotel is written too much to be like a dream, and I can’t stand that kind of thing. I think dream sequences in books are a huge waste of time, the very worst aspect of deus ex machina shoved down the reader’s eyeballs. And this entire novel is meant to be a dream, a shifting, unexplained and unexplainable, entirely unsatisfying experience.
Page after page are filled with inconsistencies, made-up-on-the-spot conveniences, last-minute explanations. And maybe such a thing is acceptable if all one wants is to get into mood or atmosphere, let plot and character development be damned. I just can’t stand blood and guts for blood and guts’ sake. If a book is going to be visceral, I need to know what the organs were doing in the first place. To call this book gratuitous is an understatement.
Nothing provided is believable, and that this is “fantasy” is no excuse. Fantasy has to work even harder to achieve a kind of believability, and author Steve Rasnic Tem doesn’t even bother. I only managed to get through the novel as far as I got by allowing myself to scan some of pages when nothing was happening except interpretation of impression of feeling. And even then I was stuck with nothing else to do and no other reading options.
And all of that is too bad, because as I said, the idea was very intriguing: a widower and his daughter are asked to come run a large, rambling, mysterious resort with more than a few “special” guests. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Shining are inevitable, but without merit, as the two books have nothing to do with one another other than being set in a remote hotel. Unless, like the Overlook, the Deadfall Hotel explodes at the end too; I don’t know if I’m going to bother reading that far to find out.