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Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Guest Post Su Halfwerk
What's so horrifying about hotels?
by Su Halfwerk
A hotel makes for a fertile horror environment. Fiction writers frequently bend and flex that setting until it fit snuggly within their writing.
Let’s face it, there’s no limitation to the number of ways things can (and do) go wrong in a hotel. For example, it can be a gloomy pit seething with spirits ready to haunt and twist one’s already damaged psych until he/she is ready to join them on their endless stroll in the dark. Stephen King showed it in The Shining. The Overlook Hotel is not the best example to promote tourism and hospitality but it is a damn good hair raising, pulse quickening read.
Sometimes the management of the hotel has screws loose as Norman Bates from Psycho by Robert Bloch proved. The movie is more known than the book even though the latter dives deeper into Bates’ unbalanced view of the world and the disfiguration of his soul.
Even gentle Agatha Christie joined in the dark fun. She wrote many books taking place in hotels, like At Bertram's Hotel. Notice that even though Christie wrote mystery novels, they all involved one act whose cruelty can’t be denied: Murder. Unlike in horror, the books play down the aggressiveness and hide all the blood, but the fact remains that a life was terminated in a…you guessed it, a hotel.
Children are introduced to the darker side of a guest house in Robert Swindells’ Room 13. During a school trip, a group of friends stay in a sinister guest house where there’s no room 13, at least during the day. The night is a different matter altogether.
In House, by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker, a couple is stranded on a deserted road until they find an inn run by a weird family. A serial killer has “killed God” and unless the guests and inn owners kill a member of their group by dawn, he was going to murder them all.
Cozy, isn’t it?
Hotels can turn adequate holidays into perfect getaways since they bring comfort to the whole leaving-home-to-see-the-world deal without worrying about cleaning, cooking, and the usual chores. However, they are also the perfect grounds to saw the seeds of our basic, most primal terrors: confinement, abandonment, torture, and humiliation.
It’s no surprise that the 5th season of American Horror Story: Hotel is set to be the darkest installment so far.
About Su Halfwerk:
Su Halfwerk writes in the horror and paranormal romance genres. From a tender age, the written word left a strong impression on her, later on terrifying, blood-chilling books became the object of her interest. Su’s style in horror combines shuddery terror with elements of surprise; some would even call it enigmatic twists. In the world of paranormal romance, she transforms the desire to scare into a quest to seduce and tantalize.
Su’s latest release, Aberrancy, occurs in a place slightly darker than a hotel; the human mind.
Books by Su Halfwerk:
- Aberrancy (Horror)
- Beholder Book 3 of the Unsettled trilogy (Paranormal Romance)
- Avenger Book 2 of the Unsettled trilogy (Paranormal Romance)
- Hellbound (Horror)
- Seeker Book 1 of the Unsettled trilogy (Paranormal Romance)
- Intricate Entanglement (Horror/Thriller)
- Zuphreen (Horror/Urban Fantasy)
- His to Possess (Finalist in 2011 EPIC Awards in the Paranormal Romance category)
When not writing, Su is designing book trailers for herself and other authors.
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