While long-missing Viv and spunky-and-obviously-looking-to-die-young Carly were great, strong women, the hotel itself, with its complex, bloody past, jumped off the page.
In fact, the hotel was less a setting and more a character.Īnd, honestly, it was the best character of all. If I had to describe this novel in one word, it would easily be “atmospheric.”Īnd that’s appropriate, I suppose, for a novel titled after a location.īut The Sun Down Motel itself was more than just the eponymous place where much of the action of the book was set. There are, clearly, truths someone is desperate to keep hidden.Īnd the closer she gets to finding the answers she seeks, the more she begins to realize that, if she keeps pushing, she might suffer the same fate as Viv did all those years ago. One thing she learns quickly is that Fell, New York, in general, and The Sun Down in particular, are rich in secrets. Prompted by the recent death of her mother - Viv’s sister - Carly has abandoned her life and her plans and come to upstate New York to do something she didn’t feel like she could do when her mother was alive: find out what happened to the aunt she has never known.ĭesperate for answers that are certainly not forthcoming, Carly takes a job at The Sun Down, working the same shift her aunt worked all those years prior. Now, over thirty years later, a new young woman - very much like Viv - arrives in town. She doesn’t realize how wrong she is, until the night she disappears. Quite the contrary, she somehow finds herself drawn even closer to this spooky motel. Though, in 1982, The Sun Down is relatively new, it’s already had a storied history.Īnd at night, when the lights are low and the outside spookily calm, Viv sees it, too.īraver than most, Viv doesn’t allow these apparitions to scare her away from The Sun Down. A young woman, on her own, without money, in the technology desert that was 1982, the odds were certainly not in her favor.ĭetermined not to go home, she takes a job working overnights at The Sun Down Motel, an ill-conceived highway-side lodging option nestled against the sleepy upstate town of Fell, New York.
It’s not surprising, really, given everything working against her.
Though Viv Delaney had her sights set on New York City when she left home, pretty much penniless and entirely without a plan, she only ever made it as far as upstate New York. Though not set in a sweeping mountain lodge but instead a small, disused highway side motel, it retained all of the creepiness of The Shining and was just as effective in inducing me to sleep with the lights on. So it’s only natural, then, that this novel scared the bejebbies out of me.
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