A GUIDE TO THE DARK

Best friends run afoul of a cursed motel room.

Layla and Mira’s spring break college-visit road trip comes to a sudden halt with a nighttime car crash in a small Indiana town. Little do they know that Wildwood Motel’s Room Nine, their impromptu lodging, has been steadily claiming lives for decades. To Layla, Room Nine’s just a room. She’s far more concerned with getting to show her portfolio at her dream college, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at an event the following day and hopefully getting off their waitlist (even though her parents want her to stay close to home in Michigan—the same parents Egyptian American Layla can’t come out to for fear of losing their love). But Mira—deeply grieving her younger brother’s drowning death last summer during a visit to family in Tunisia—immediately feels the weighty wrongness of the room and starts experiencing impossible things. While trying to figure out if it’s concussion, grief, or something else, Mira befriends the teenage son of the motel’s owner, a boy who lost his father to Room Nine. As their investigation deepens, so does the sense of doom and danger. The prose is punctuated by Layla’s black-and-white photographs, lending a lovely sense of immersion. The ending balances emotional growth (and a touch of romance) with pain and a horror stinger. Layla and Mira are both Muslim and grapple with their immigrant parents’ expectations and their sexualities.

Introspective, character-driven, and—most importantly—haunting.