A middle of the night e-library checkout that I thought was going to be a straight murder mystery but turned out to have a lot of ghost story about it. I generally avoid supernatural stories as every time I’ve tried them I get annoyed with gullible characters and deus ex machina nature of the plots. I stuck with this one though as it was providing me with much needed distraction. I figured I was better getting annoyed with fictional characters than than the reality inside my head.

It’s a story told switching between two viewpoints: Viv is a young woman far from home in 1982, working at a rundown motel in upstate New York; and Carly is her niece in 2017, about the same age as Viv was in 1982. Carly comes to the same (even more rundown) motel searching for answers about what happened to her aunt, Viv, who hasn’t been seen since 1982. The writing had some clunky phases in the beginning but flowed much better as the book went on, I found the characters all pretty believable even as they believed in the hauntings around them.

I kept thinking of the motel I worked in Maine for a summer in 1992, that was also rather rundown despite not being that old, and by the looks of its mostly terrible online reviews it hasn’t been updated much since (no reports of hauntings though!). As such I found the fact that Carly finds the exact same fixtures at the Sun Down Motel 35 years after Viv found them to be pretty believable. So the book felt like a bit of a weird old nostalgia trip for me, with some interesting characters, and I enjoyed the mystery plot, and I surprised myself by finding I could cope with the supernatural elements of it too.