Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Release Date: February 18, 2020
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers / Supernatural / Horror
The Sun Down Motel, by author Simone St. James, is a mixture of the supernatural, horror, and mystery. The story also alternates between 1982, and 2017 and takes place in the fictional town of Fell, New York. The author has described her story as, "a little I'll Be Gone in the Dark, a dash of Mindhunter, with some Bates Motel thrown in." The story begins by asking the question, what happened to Vivian Delaney who disappeared November 29, 1982? Vivian disappeared without a trace after she ran from her home in Illinois and her family never was able to find out what really happened to her.
Fast forward 35 years later. 20-year old Carly Kirk has just lost her mother, dropped out of college, and has chosen to attempt to find out what happened to her aunt. Carly, like her aunt, drives in from Illinois searching for answers as to what happened to Vivia on November 29, 1982. In
the process, she becomes a night clerk at the Sun Down Motel where her aunt also worked. The same motel her aunt disappeared from
thirty-five years ago. She meets a mysterious guest by the name of Nick Harkness, and ends up right in the middle of the same mystery and ghostly happenings that her aunt went through. Carly soon realizes the mystery of her aunt's disappearance isn't
the only mystery haunting Fell or even the Sun Down Motel. Soon she
becomes entangled in an investigation that unknowingly mirrors her
aunt's own.
Back in 1982, Vivian Delaney was on her way to NYC when she was detoured to Fell, NY. She gets as job working the front
desk midnight shift at the Sun Down Motel. All she has to do is
stay in the office and give people the keys when they come to
check in. But, right from the very
beginning Viv realizes that things aren't quite right. She can smell the cigarette of
an invisible smoker, sees a boy run away from her when the motel should
be empty, hears the screams of a woman who tells her to run. Doors open
and shut on their own. The motel is clearly haunted.
During Vivian's stay, young women were being murdered in Fell and Vivian believed she could find out why. Viv quickly discovered that there’s a reason why Janice was so eager to
offload all the responsibility onto her. But, it will take 35 more years before we discover what really happened to Vivian and why she chose to disappear without a trace. Did something bad happened to her? Was she one of the murdered young women? Although they don't exist simultaneously, Carly and Viv’s stories run in eerie parallels.
While Carly has her roommate Heather and the mysterious Nick Harkness to help put the pieces together before it's too late, Viv actually had the help of two black women, one a cop (Alma Trent), and the other a photographer (Marnie Mahoney), who was paid to take photos of cheating spouses as well as helping out the police department. Viv became friends with both women after a fashion. 35 years after Vivian, these same two women have some explaining to do as to what they know about Vivian's disappearance.
Will Carly fly headlong into danger that also loosed her Aunt like a hound seeking vengeance? One has to read the book to find out! The reason for my rating is pretty simple: The
repetitive nature of the past and present chapters read almost word for word as the same conversations, which
slowed the pacing down. I still have to read the authors previous book called The Broken Girls. Hopefully, I won't have the same issues.
Fell, New York
November 1982
Viv
The night it all ended, Vivian was alone.
That
was fine with her. She preferred it. It was something she’d discovered,
working the night shift at this place in the middle of nowhere: Being
with people was easy, but being alone was hard. Especially being alone
in the dark. The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no
one but oneself and one’s own thoughts-that person was stronger than
anyone else. More ready. More prepared.
Still,
she pulled into the parking lot of the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New
York, and paused, feeling the familiar beat of fear. She sat in her
beat-up Cavalier, the key in the ignition, the heat and the radio on,
her coat huddled around her shoulders. She looked at the glowing blue
and yellow sign, the two stories of rooms in two long stripes in the
shape of an L, and thought, I don’t want to go in there. But I will. She
was ready, but she was still afraid. It was 10:59 p.m.
She felt like crying. She felt like screaming. She felt sick.
I don’t want to go in there.
But I will. Because I always do.
Outside,
two drops of half-frozen rain hit the windshield. A truck droned by on
the road in the rearview mirror. The clock ticked over to eleven
o’clock, and the news came on the radio. Another minute and she’d be
late, but she didn’t care. No one would fire her. No one cared if she
came to work. The Sun Down had few customers, none of whom would notice
if the night girl was late. It was often so quiet that an observer would
think that nothing ever happened here.
Viv Delaney knew better.
The Sun Down only looked empty. But it wasn’t.
With
cold fingers, she pulled down the driver’s-side visor. She touched her
hair, which she’d had cut short, a sharp style that ended below her
earlobes and was teased out for volume. She checked her eye makeup-not
the frosty kind, like some girls wore, but a soft lavender purple. It
looked a little like bruises. You could streak it with yellow and orange
to create a days-old-bruise effect, but she hadn’t bothered with that
tonight. Just the purple on the delicate skin of her lids, meeting the
darker line of her eyeliner and lashes. Why had she put makeup on at
all? She couldn’t remember.
On
the radio, they talked about a body. A girl found in a ditch off
Melborn Road, ten miles from here. Not that here was anywhere-just a
motel on the side of a two-lane highway leading out of Fell and into the
nothingness of upstate New York and eventually Canada. But if you took
the two-lane for a mile and made a right at the single light dangling
from an overhead wire, and followed that road to another and another,
you’d be where the girl’s body was found. A girl named Tracy Waters,
last seen leaving a friend’s house in a neighboring town. Eighteen years
old, stripped naked and dumped in a ditch. They’d found her body two
days after her parents reported her missing.
As
she sat in her car, twenty-year-old Viv Delaney’s hands shook as she
listened to the story. She thought about what it must be like to lie
naked as the half-frozen rain pelted your helpless skin. How horribly
cold that would be. How it was always girls who ended up stripped and
dead like roadkill. How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you
were-it could always be you.
Especially here. It could always be you.
Her
gaze went to the motel, to the reflection of the gaudy lit-up blue and
yellow sign blinking endlessly in the darkness. vacancy. cable tv!
vacancy. cable tv!
Even
after three months in this place, she could still be scared. Awfully,
perfectly scared, her thoughts skittering up the back of her neck and
around her brain in panic. I’m alone for the next eight hours, alone in
the dark. Alone with her and the others.
And
despite herself, Viv turned the key so the heat and the radio-still
talking about Tracy Waters-went off. Lifted her chin and pushed open the
driver’s-side door. Stepped out into the cold.
She
hunched deeper into her nylon coat and started across the parking lot.
She was wearing jeans and a pair of navy blue sneakers with white laces,
the soles too thin for the cold and damp. The rain wet her hair, and
the wind pushed it out of place. She walked across the lot toward the
door that said office.
Inside
the office, Johnny was standing behind the counter, zipping up his coat
over his big stomach. He’d probably seen her from the window in the
door. “Are you late?” he asked, though there was a clock on the wall
behind him.
“Five
minutes,” Viv argued back, unzipping her own coat. Her stomach felt
tight, queasy now that she was inside. I want to go home.
But
where was home? Fell wasn’t home. Neither was Illinois, where she was
born. When she left home for the last time, after the final screaming
fight with her mother, she’d supposedly been headed to New York to
become an actress. But that, like everything else in her life to that
point, had been a part she was playing, a story. She had no idea how to
become a New York actress-the story had enraged her mother, which had
made it good enough. What Viv had wanted, more than anything, was to
simply be in motion, to go.
So she’d gone. And she’d ended up here. Fell would have to be home for now.
“Mrs.
Bailey is in room two-seventeen,” Johnny said, running down the motel’s
few guests. “She already made a liquor run, so expect a phone call
anytime.”
“Great,”
Viv said. Mrs. Bailey came to the Sun Down to drink, probably because
if she did it at home she’d get in some kind of trouble. She made
drunken phone calls to the front desk to make demands she usually forgot
about. “Anyone else?”
“The
couple on their way to Florida checked out,” Johnny said. “We’ve had
two prank phone calls, both heavy breathing. Stupid teenagers. And I
wrote a note to Janice about the door to number one-oh-three. There’s
something wrong with it. It keeps blowing open in the wind, even when I
lock it.”
“It
always does that,” Viv said. “You told Janice about it a week ago.”
Janice was the motel’s owner, and Viv hadn’t seen her in weeks. Months,
maybe. She didn’t come to the motel if she didn’t have to, and she
certainly didn’t come at night. She left Vivian’s paychecks in an
envelope on the desk, and all communication was handled with notes. Even
the motel’s owner didn’t spend time here if she could help it.
“Well, she should fix the door,” Johnny said. “I mean, it’s strange, right? I locked it.”
“Sure,” Viv said. “It’s strange.”
She
was used to this. No one else who worked at the motel saw what she saw
or experienced what she did. The things she saw only happened in the
middle of the night. The day shift and the evening shift employees had
no idea.
“Hopefully no one else will check in,” Johnny said, pulling the hood of his jacket over his head. “Hopefully it’ll be quiet.”
It’s never quiet, Viv thought, but she said, “Yes, hopefully.”
Viv
watched him walk out of the office, listened to his car start up and
drive away. Johnny was thirty-six and lived with his mother. Viv
pictured him going home, maybe watching TV before going to bed. A guy
who had never made much of himself, living a relatively normal life,
free of the kind of fear Viv was feeling. A life in which he never
thought about Tracy Waters, except to vaguely recall her name from the
radio.
Maybe it was just her who was going crazy.
The
quiet settled in, broken only by the occasional sound of the traffic on
Number Six Road and the wind in the trees behind the motel. It was now
11:12. The clock on the wall behind the desk ticked over to 11:13.
She
hung her jacket on the hook in the corner. From another hook she took a
navy blue polyester vest with the words Sun Down Motel embroidered on
the left breast and shrugged it on over her white blouse. She pulled out
the hard wooden chair behind the counter and sat in it. She surveyed
the scarred, stained desktop quickly: jar of pens and pencils, the black
square that made a clacking sound when you dragged the handle back and
forth over a credit card to make a carbon impression, puke-colored
rotary phone. In the middle of the desk was a large, flat book, where
guests were to write their information and sign their names when
checking in. The guest book was open to November 1982.
Pulling a notebook from her purse, Viv pulled a pen from between its pages, opened the notebook on the desk, and wrote.
Nov. 29
Door to number 103 has begun to open again. Prank calls. No one here. Tracy Waters is dead.
A
sound came from outside, and she paused, her head half raised. A bang,
and then another one. Rhythmic and wild. The door to number 103 blowing
open and hitting the wall in the wind. Again.
For
a second, Viv closed her eyes. The fear came over her in a wave, but
she was too far in it now. She was already here. She had to be ready.
The Sun Down had claimed her for the night.
She lowered the pen again.
What if everything I’ve seen, everything I think, is true? Because I think it is.
Her
eyes glanced to the guest book, took in the names there. She paused as
the clock on the wall behind her shoulder ticked on, then wrote again.
The
ghosts are awake tonight. They’re restless. I think this will be over
soon. Her hand trembled, and she tried to keep it steady. I’m so sorry,
Tracy. I’ve failed.
A
small sound escaped the back of her throat, but she bit it down into
silence. She put the pen down and rubbed her eyes, some of the pretty
lavender eyeshadow coming off on her fingertips.
It was November 29, 1982, 11:24 p.m.
By three o’clock in the morning, Viv Delaney had vanished.
That was the beginning.
Fell, New York
November 2017
Carly
This place was unfamiliar.
I
opened my eyes and stared into the darkness, panicked. Strange bed,
strange light through the window, strange room. I had a minute of free
fall, frightening and exhilarating at the same time.
Then I remembered: I was in Fell, New York.
My name was Carly Kirk, I was twenty years old, and I wasn’t supposed to be here.
I
checked my phone on the nightstand; it was four o’clock in the morning,
only the light from streetlamps and the twenty-four-hour Denny’s
shining through the sheer drapes on the hotel room window and making a
hazy square on the wall.
I
wasn’t getting back to sleep now. I swung my legs over the side of the
bed and picked up my glasses from the nightstand, putting them on. I’d
driven from Illinois yesterday, a long drive that left me tired enough
to sleep like the dead in this bland chain hotel in downtown Fell.
It
wasn’t that impressive a place; Google Earth had told me that much.
Downtown was a grid of cafŽs, laundromats, junky antique stores,
apartment rental buildings, and used-book stores, nestled reverently
around a grocery store and a CVS. The street I was on, with the chain
hotel and the Denny’s, passed straight through town, as if a lot of
people got to Fell and simply kept driving without making the turnoff
into the rest of the town. The welcome to fell sign I’d passed last
night had been vandalized by a wit who had used spray paint to add the
words turn back.
I didn’t turn back.
With my glasses on, I picked up my phone again and scrolled through the emails and texts that had come in while I slept.
The
first email was from my family’s lawyer. The remainder of funds has
been deposited into your account. Please see breakdown attached.
I
flipped past it without reading the rest, without opening the
attachment. I didn’t need to see it: I already knew I’d inherited some
of Mom’s money, split with my brother, Graham. I knew it wasn’t riches,
but it was enough to keep me in food and shelter for a little while. I
didn’t want numbers, and I couldn’t look at them. Losing your mother to
cancer-she was only fifty-one-made things like money look petty and
stupid.
In
fact, it made you rethink everything in your life. Which in my crazy
way, after fourteen months in a fog of grief, I was doing. And I
couldn’t stop.
There
was a string of texts from Graham. What do you think you’re doing,
Carly? Leaving college? For how long? You think you can keep up?
Whatever. If all that tuition is down the drain, you’re on your own. You
know that, right? Whatever you’re doing, good luck with it. Try not to
get killed.
I
hit Reply and typed, Hey, drama queen. It’s only for a few days, and
I’m acing everything. This is just a side trip, because I’m curious. So
sue me. I’ll be fine. No plans to get killed, but thanks for checking.
Actually,
I was hoping to be here for longer than a few days. Since losing Mom,
staying in college for my business degree seemed pointless. When I’d
started college, I’d thought I had all the time in the world to figure
out what I wanted to do. But Mom’s death showed me that life wasn’t as
long as you thought it was. And I had questions I wanted answers to. It
was time to find them.
Hailey,
Graham’s fiancŽe, had sent me her own text. Hey! You OK?? Worried about
you. I’m here to talk if you want. Maybe you need another grief
counselor? I can find you one! OK? XO!
God,
she was so nice. I’d already done grief counseling. Therapy. Spirit
circles. Yoga. Meditation. Self-care. In doing all of that, what I’d
discovered was that I didn’t need another therapy session right now.
What I really needed, at long last, was answers.
I
put down my phone and opened my laptop, tapping it awake. I opened the
file on my desktop, scrolling through it. I picked out a scan of a
newspaper from 1982, with the headline POLICE SEARCHING FOR MISSING
LOCAL WOMAN. Beneath the headline was a photo of a young woman, clipped
from a snapshot. She was beautiful, vivacious, smiling at the camera,
her hair teased, her bangs sprayed in place up from her forehead as the
rest of her hair hung down in a classic eighties look. Her skin was
clear and her eyes sparkled, even in black and white. The caption below
the photo said: Twenty-year-old Vivian Delaney has not been seen since
the night of November 29. Anyone who has seen her is asked to call the
police.
i have seen this one before and it's my kind of read. i may have it on my kindle and now i feel the need to see if i do
ReplyDeletesherry @ fundinmental