Hotel register 2014.003
Fear in search of a form. I applaud the search: the intelligence that comes up with figures like “tiny robots trapped in a net” (fish) won’t rest easy with stock templates. The shuffling of narrators and times, the prologue that makes no sense until a second reading, are well worked but too busy for a situation that is purposely anti-narrative. Having a house as one of your narrators is, yes, a truly creepy way to get at a horror that goes back generations and has no in or out. It raises literal chills. But houses don’t move. As a short story (a long short story, after the Hoffman and Poe it name-checks) this would have been devastating.
