She’s a “final girl” whose denouement horrifies in a modern, bloodless way. The strength of van den Berg’s storytelling comes from Clare’s attempts to solve the mystery of why Richard has hunkered down in a different country, layered with grief from back home that continues to haunt her. Not every author can make a character both fly through supernatural events and remain grounded in a place the way van den Berg does with Clare.

Van den Berg throws Clare again and again into uneasy situations with inexplicable outcomes this author has no fear of magical realism–and while she’s already been compared to giants of the genre, The Third Hotel owes its eerie power to no one else. Clare tells us on the first page, “I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,” an excellent description of grief, but also of modern Havana, a city that has recently opened to Western tourists but remains architecturally and materially beholden to its long communist past. Things go bump in the night, and so do ideas, with the overall effect that readers will be as unsettled as the protagonist at every turn. Where was her husband now? Clare agonizes after his stateside funeral. Everything is seen through lenses fogged with loss and pain. (A very bad haircut is involved.) And that hunt involves clues, from an unopened white box to a small red notebook to calls from Clare’s mother at home. Clare becomes fascinated by Revolución Zombi‘s own “final girl,” actor Agata Alonso, whose glamorous aura seems to increase as Clare’s departs in her hunt for Richard. Van den Berg makes use of the horror-film trope of “final girls,” the female characters whose survival gives the audience hope even as it points to their demise. Another character talks with Clare about humanity’s purported “third eye,” the seat of intuition and knowledge. She has Clare tell us that she always travels with, but never finishes, a copy of Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January, a book about a nasty con artist. Again the author shines neon toward symbols. Van den Berg’s novel is a palimpsest of B-grade Latin American horror films, the psychology of grief, and the very idea of narrative as a meaning-making enterprise. Clare herself has taken a room in the third hotel she contacted, a grubby place with a grumpy young woman named Isa at the reception desk. Laura van den Berg’s beautiful and unsettling new novel, The Third Hotel, picks up a similar strand, constructing a narrative of memory, geography, loss, and emptiness.

The third hotel by laura van den berg