This book is no simple haunted hotel story; this is a stylistically masterful book with compelling characters that had me laughing and crying at turns, grieving, suspecting, hating, and loving everyone by turns.

The narration style of the book reminded me of a game like Stanley Parable or Portal 2 in that the narrator is an aggressively present character who demands you believe their interpretation of the story, almost to the point of dictating what the characters (and the reader) are doing, believing, and feeling. This style definitely won't be for everyone because it is intentionally focused on telling over showing, but I absolutely loved it. Ryan can also just write. As just one example, the experience of entering a room with a bad smell is described as "It came through the nose, smelling burning hair, and stabbed the tastebuds in the back of the throat." Stabbed the tastebuds? That's incredibly evocative and specific.

I have read a lot of books in my time, and I find myself generally not very emotionally invested or impacted most of the time, but here, I could not look away, even as I wanted to hide my eyes from the looming dread over the hotel. My voracious reading habit has also led to generally having a sense for how books will go, but I was continually second-guessing who was alive, who was dead, who had killed someone, who had been killed in the hotel, or before arriving. My theories ranged everywhere, and the further I got in the book, the more convoluted they got and the more believable the insane became, mirroring the journey many of the characters, especially Lawrence, went on. I felt like one of the beleaguered staff of the hotel, screaming about the end times in the flooding cellar with Joel.

Would I stay at The Hotel Genovie? Probably not. Will I read Shane Ryan's future books? Absolutely.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.