Travelers Rest by Keith Lee Morris, book review: A fine addition to the creepy hotel thriller genre

Hotels have always been source of inspiration for writers – and a home for the less than well-adjusted – from Stephen King’s crazed novelist Jack Torrance in The Shining to Lady Gaga’s bloodsucking fashionista in the gothic US television series American Horror Story: Hotel. Perhaps it’s those long corridors with their anonymous doors, behind which anything could happen or the faded grandeur of a once magnificent lobby with its shadows and its secrets.

In Travelers Rest a family of four – mother Julia Addison, husband Tonio, 10-year-old son Dewey and Tonio’s wayward brother Robbie, a recovering alcoholic – are on their way home to South Carolina from Seattle when they pass a sign to a town in Idaho called Good Night. It’s snowing, they’re tired and they enter an old mining town. “It seems like a nice place,” says Julia. “Look, they have a beautiful old hotel… This can be like a little adventure along the way.” What they should have done of course, as every reader realises is immediately hightail it out of there. But they don’t and the adventure begins.

The hotel, the Travelers Rest, is empty and seemingly under repair; the owner is an “odd-looking man with a large nose and thick moustache”; the room they’re shown to is “sober and serious”. Soon, the family become separated. Robbie finds a bar across the street, Tonio and Dewey are parted after visiting a nearby diner and Julia, who seems to hold the key to the whole mystery, drifts off to sleep and wakes in a different room.

From then on each character enters their own personal heaven and hell. For some it’s a sort of grand guignol Groundhog Day with the present meshing with the past as day becomes night and the snow continues to fall. Odd characters emerge – a female singer, a bar girl and another young boy, along with the ever-present hotel owner, Tiffin. Some appear to be from the present day, others from the hotel’s mysterious past. Tonio and Julia often merge into 19th-century versions of themselves.

It’s a hotel and a town that no one, it seems, can leave. As one of the characters explains, “think of a place where everything is opposite. Everything that’s alive is dead and everything that’s dead is alive. The past is the future and the future is the past. Dreams are reality.”

It says much of Morris’s skill that he’s able to keep us bewitched and beguiled in this topsy-turvy world with its endless corridors, twisting stairs and Escher-like surroundings. The novel culminates in an almost operatic grand finale where past and present meet in a satisfying conclusion.

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