Once she found a human fingernail in a drawer–and that haunts her. Clare travels often for work and is usually at home in hotels, but she has seen some bizarre things. She calls her hotel the “Third Hotel,” because she had to ask concierges of two other hotels for directions before she found it. But her husband, Richard, killed in a hit-and-run accident in New York, was a scholar of horror films, and she wants to meet the director of the first horror film made in Cuba, Revolución Zombie.Ĭuba is gorgeous, hot and disturbing: dazed by beauty and unmarked streets, Clare keeps getting lost. Cuba is not her kind of place: she is an elevator sales rep whose favorite state is Nebraska, because of the blandness and flatness. In December, she flies to Havana for the Festival of New Latin American Cinema he’d planned to attend. She has been numb for some time, and is now mourning the loss of her husband. In The Third Hotel, the heroine, Clare, a widow, no longer understands the meaning of her life.
And it is more sophisticated than her first book, Find Me, a beautifully-written dystopian novel about a plague of forgetfulness (which I wrote about here). Is it magic realism? Is it horror? It doesn’t quite matter: this poetic, genre-crossing novel is eerily gorgeous. Laura van den Berg’s haunting new novel, The Third Hotel, defies classification.
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