THE INVISIBLE HOTEL

A young woman struggling to find her way in South Korea wrestles with the generational grief of a country torn asunder.

This ethereal debut novel, at once a horror story and a bird’s bone–delicate exploration of trauma, is filled with ghosts. Like many of the menaces imagined here, the story never fully materializes, but that doesn’t prevent the atmosphere from being chilling. Our narrator is Yewon, a young South Korean woman. She has some school under her belt and dreams of going to college in Australia or living in a real city like Seoul instead of the small town where she’s just finished her last day at a dead-end job and lives with her disparaging mother. Yewon’s running monologue is straight-laced, but Ham somehow conjures up a delicious tension among her lead’s longing to become something, the little tragedies unfolding around her, and the spooky aftereffects of the Korean War. There’s Yewon’s sister, who is pregnant and getting a divorce from her husband. Broadening her horizons are her best friend, Min, and Tae-kwun, a young engineering student she dates. There’s not much time for fun, though. There’s the old North Korean woman Yewon agrees to drive to a prison to visit her brother, which reminds Yewon that her own brother, Jae-hyun, is stationed at a military base close to the DMZ. There’s her father, dead from a factory explosion in Saudi Arabia. Most of all, there’s her mother ritually washing the bones of their ancestors in the bathtub where Yewon was born. All of these simmering tensions lead to Yewon’s increasingly frightening visions of the titular hotel: “I was a guest. Traveling far from home, come to a foreign place. A stranger to where I arrived. Though I don’t remember coming to a hotel or traveling at all. I don’t want a room. I need to get out.”

An intriguing debut—not a story of war, but of a nightmarish visit to its echo chamber.