{"id":152024651,"date":"2024-12-06T13:31:28","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T13:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=152024651"},"modified":"2024-12-06T13:31:28","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T13:31:28","slug":"friday-links-haunted-hotels-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=152024651","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: Haunted Hotels Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Alicia was so much smaller than most of the other buildings around her, and so much more interesting. She was special.” – Juan Martinez, ‘Extended Stay’<\/h2>

Being a person who believes borders are stupid and nationalism is outdated, I am strongly pro-immigration. More accurately, I\u2019m pro-free movement of human beings. It would be nice if the country I lived in was the shining, welcoming land of promise it likes to pretend it is. Well, the room might look<\/em> clean when the United States of America opens its doors. In reality, though, we\u2019ve stuffed all of the unimaginable horror into the closets and baby, them closets is a-burstin. <\/p>

What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong><\/p>

A book that approaches the idea of a haunted house\u2014haunted hotel<\/em>, scuse you\u2014in a wholly new way. A book that synthesizes the terror of civil violence, the immigrant experience, service industry work (in this case, being a line cook and helping manage a hotel), family drama, and yawning, gaping cosmic horror into one 300-page stew. A book where sometimes I couldn\u2019t tell what exactly what was going on\u2014and neither could the characters. I\u2019m talking, of course, about Extended Stay <\/em>by Juan Martinez. <\/p>

\"Extended<\/figure>

Look, CWs\u2014intense ones\u2014up front: this is a haunted house book, following siblings Alvaro and Carmen. But it begins with a massacre. The kind of massacre you\u2019d normally find in Rushdie<\/a>\u2014Alvaro witnesses his mother and father and 10-year-old sister butchered by guerilla fighters in all the usual ways: machete slicing, rape, mutilation, forcing people to shoot their loved ones. It is well-written, but not fun to read. It\u2019s sadly not all that unfamiliar or shocking if you read a lot of postcolonial literature, which I believe that you should do. The world is full of horror, we read to steel ourselves. <\/p>

Speaking of horror!<\/p>

Once you get past that initial scene, the book is a more \u201cstraightforward\u201d horror book. Like I said up top, it can be confusing, the kind of book where you just hold on and trust the text. The confusion is also mirrored by Alvaro\u2019s increasing delirium and the ways the hotel is infecting him. There are questions of guilt and culpability vs. Sometimes The World Just Dumps On You, there are some wonderfully-drawn tech-vested execs, there is a Very Good Dog, and, eventually, there is a gooey explosion of monstrosity that will either prevent this book from ever being made into a movie or be made into the slickest, slimiest horror this side of The Thing<\/em>\/Alien<\/em>. This book is not great if you have a severe phobia of being trapped, but otherwise? Yeah man, read this book. Haunted hotels! Who\u2019da thunk it!<\/p>

LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>

Something to listen to while you browse? Goddamn if this Butcher Brown video on KEXP didn\u2019t make me fall in love. Let\u2019s go on a journey together, because these links are all me cleaning out my tabs for the stuff I think you\u2019d think is most important. <\/p>

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