HORROR HOTEL

Four ghost-hunting friends travel to Los Angeles to film overnight at the Hearst Hotel, a site notorious for its violent past, in this supernatural thriller.

Told in alternating first-person perspectives by Las Vegas teens Chrissy, Chase, Emmaline, and Kiki, the story stays tightly focused on their clandestine Halloween weekend road trip, quickly filling in their background at the beginning as a team who regularly post to a popular YouTube channel they created about ghostly happenings. Chrissy is the only one with the psychic ability to perceive ghosts, an experience that has left her traumatized since she first began seeing spectral beings when her mother became ill and died when she was a child. Her disturbing experience at the hotel is described in grim detail as she runs into the mutilated ghosts of one murdered young woman after another, which doesn’t always mesh with the slow-burn romance subplot as Bram, a fellow psychic, appears on the scene and, to Chase’s chagrin, seems to be sweeping Chrissy off her feet (Emma also nurses a crush on Kiki). Creepy hotel managers, jump scares, and an overall eerie atmosphere are entertaining, and the plot moves swiftly through familiar genre territory. Most significant characters default to White; Kiki has dark-brown skin.

A brief, engaging, and at times grisly mystery that will keep readers guessing.