Horror Hotel

December 1, 2021
Four ghost-hunting friends travel to Los Angeles to film overnight at the Hearst Hotel, a site notorious for its violent past, in this supernatural thriller. Told in alternating first-person perspectives by Las Vegas teens Chrissy, Chase, Emmaline, and Kiki, the story stays tightly focused on their clandestine Halloween weekend road trip, quickly filling in their background at the beginning as a team who regularly post to a popular YouTube channel they created about ghostly happenings. Chrissy is the only one with the psychic ability to perceive ghosts, an experience that has left her traumatized since she first began seeing spectral beings when her mother became ill and died when she was a child. Her disturbing experience at the hotel is described in grim detail as she runs into the mutilated ghosts of one murdered young woman after another, which doesn't always mesh with the slow-burn romance subplot as Bram, a fellow psychic, appears on the scene and, to Chase's chagrin, seems to be sweeping Chrissy off her feet (Emma also nurses a crush on Kiki). Creepy hotel managers, jump scares, and an overall eerie atmosphere are entertaining, and the plot moves swiftly through familiar genre territory. Most significant characters default to White; Kiki has dark-brown skin. A brief, engaging, and at times grisly mystery that will keep readers guessing. (Supernatural thriller. 14-18)

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December 20, 2021
A ghost vlog turns murder mystery in Fulton and McClaren’s layered horror debut. When Las Vegas–based YouTube group the Ghost Gang—alternating narrators white Chrissy, Filipinx and Irish Chase, presumed-white Emmaline, and Kiki, who has “dark brown skin”—head to L.A.’s infamous Hearst Hotel to film over Halloween, Chase is sure the visit will earn them the Gold Play button that comes with amassing one million subscribers. As Chrissy, the group’s sole psychic member, picks up the hotel’s overwhelming spiritual energy and encounters the ghosts of murdered women, she also meets fellow psychic Bram Kelly, white and Australian, who’s there investigating the death of a grad student whose remains were found in the hotel 10 years prior. While filming the room where a serial killer purportedly died by suicide, the Gang encounters the body of a house cleaner, launching their dabblings into a full inquiry. True crime buffs will recognize the story’s inspiration as the
real-life Cecil Hotel, and though Fulton and McClaren successfully depict the terror of the supernatural occurrences and adhere to common mystery tropes, the depiction of Skid Row (“the most haunted hotel in America in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Los Angeles”) and the variation on a real-life disappearance feel exploitative. Ages 12–up. Agent: Katie Shea Boutillier, Donald Maass Literary.