Kurtain Motel
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Review Score: 3 out of 5Where to Find: Amazon, Google Play, Barnes and Noble
Review |
This little mystery novel starts with a man named Alex who ends up at a diner in the middle of nowhere. Anxious to get out of the rain that approached as fast as its announcement, he noticed something about this diner isn’t what it seems. Soon, he is haunted by one of the men in the diner who knows things about him he shouldn’t know. The diner occupants multiply and force him to confess an ultimate sin he committed to end up as a top CEO, but he runs out into the night to escape the voices.
Sounds like an exciting premise, right? From the prologue, I was hooked, however I get the sense I was catfished. For one instance, I waited the whole novel for Alex to reappear, or maybe he would be the voice of reason; the character that lived through the events and would help the new characters. But nope. Alex is only in the prologue. My guess is that he was just a throw away character to show off the danger of the novel.
So, who is the protagonist then? While there are several characters in this novel, It’s safe to bet the protagonist is Patrick Lahm, a writer on his way to a book signing in Connecticut when the storm comes out of nowhere and he runs out of gas. He is picked up by Father Harold, another character in the book that had prominent focus early on but was subjugated to a background character later. They decide the storm is too intense to drive through, so they stop at the Kurtain Motel for the night, and Harold promises to drive Patrick back to his car to get it re-fueled in the morning.
This is where many of the other characters of the novel are introduced, however I found them to be numerous, and because of that, boring. Most characters I could not keep apart from the next, and when that character would disappear for a few chapters only to pop up later, I had to try to remember who this character was, and what they do again. Most had no personalities to help keep them apart. And only their jobs or what sin they committed was their only traits. We had three people employed at the hotel (the owner, the maintenance man, and the bartender), the actress, the baseball player, another woman (who for the life of me I could not remember what she did, only that it made her very rich) whose only defining trait was that she’s overweight, Patrick the writer, the priest, the hedge fund CFO, and a mother and her son who don’t appear as they seem. As you can read, there’s a lot of characters, and the author tried his best to give them something to keep them apart, but there is just too many to keep track of. Which leads into my next issue.
I don’t care about any of these characters. Many are supposed to be superficial, which makes it believable they would commit these sins, however, nothing they do is redeemable either. The only one I paid attention to, and I think the author did as well, was Patrick. At some moments he can be overly aggressive in his approach, while other times he’s very passive, letting characters around him make decisions.
But enough about characters, this is supposed to be a horror thriller. So, the plot is scary and intense, right? Eh. Without going into spoiler territory, each character is confronted by a sin they committed which is twisted into a horror fashion. And while I think it worked at first, the issue was over saturation. You know how in Jaws, they only showed the shark in small, key moments to emphasize how scary this big shark was? Well, that was not done here. Some moments I think worked really well such as the baseball player’s and Patrick’s first nightmare. These build suspense, and with both of theirs in the beginning of the novel, you ride the high of what’s going on with these characters and why is this happening. However, when the same visions keep coming and not altering in their approach, I started to get bored. I felt like the other shoe was never going to drop, and when you start to lose the interest of the reader, it doesn’t matter how good your climax is. Speaking of which.
*SPOILER ALERT IF YOU EVER WANT TO READ THIS NOVEL OR MORE IN THE SERIES*
You read that right…series. And boy does it feel like it. Just like a pre-planned franchise that has been plaguing our TVs for the last few years, this feels like the author wanted to keep the mystery alive, and thus didn’t want to reveal what was happening to these people. But by not revealing this earlier, I was checked out by time I reached the middle of the book. Towards the end, like the last twenty pages, we get an information dump by the psychic boy that these are Soul Collectors and they want to possess the bodies of sinners, and once the person confesses their sin, the Soul Collector can possess them. My first issue with this is that it came towards the end of the novel, which means this will be a conflict for future novels without giving a fulfilling conclusion to this one, and by saying what they are doesn’t mean it explains just how powerful these things are or if there are multiple. At one point, it seems like these Soul Collectors are great illusionists, and can make their victims see the people they’ve killed, see and feel the constant rain, and even make them believe its constantly night. But its never explained just how far their reach is. Did they really follow Patrick to make him believe his car was broken down? If they are confined to the hotel, then how was Alex (the poor prologue guy) being haunted at an undisclosed diner? If these people were chosen to be victims, why now? Why not attack when they are more isolated? Why attack them in the same hotel a couple of psychics are located at?
Which also brings me to the boy and his mother. Both seem to know what’s going on, and are unaffected by the Soul Collectors, but its never explained why. According to the first two chapters I read, it appears they will play a bigger role in the second novel, but I found them to be deus ex machina. Telling Patrick what to do or where he should go to move the plot along, but not in a meaningful way. The only character they technically help is Patrick, but they leave the others to die. Even after I finished reading the book, I kept thinking if they were omitted, nothing would’ve really changed.
Final Thoughts
This was a very messy novel. I can say I did finish it, but it was a struggle. The way it was wrote also made it difficult. The novel makes the grave mistake of switching from one point of view to another character in the scene (This was done a couple of times, but the author didn’t do this later on) which was jarring. And then, from what I can only guess to make it feel like a movie, he will follow several characters in the same chapter. Sometimes only giving a paragraph to a character, before we swap to a different one. This way of telling the story just shortened the characters’ potential, which made them seem very hollow and not well fleshed out.
I think if we cut out a few characters or merge some characters together to make it a bit snappier, more development could’ve been used to differentiate them. If you want Patrick to be the main character who can maybe see other people’s fears, why not just tell the whole story from his perspective? Why do I need to see the perspective of the actress, when she does nothing in the whole story, and even other characters call her useless later on? This needed to be a contained story. You can have a series, nothing wrong with that, but your story needs to be self-contained. In the first Harry Potter, yes we get the sense that Harry will be battling Voldemort through the whole series, but holes are not left in the story as to who Voldemort could be, or what he might or might not be capable of. The first story is self-contained in finding the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone for us Americans) and stopping someone from getting it and using it for evil.
Even after reading this novel. I still have no idea what they were fighting, how it can be fought, and why it chooses its victims. I was bored, and that’s something you never want your reader to be when its supposed to be a horror/ mystery/ thriller. Overall, I don’t recommend this book. It was a quick read (only about ~150 not counting the last few chapters of the second book), and yet it was a slog about half way through. If you want to give it a go, like art, books are subjective too, maybe you will get more out of it than I did, but I don’t think I will be giving anymore books in this series a read.
I guess I’m confessing my sin of reading this book to the end when I could’ve spent my time elsewhere.
Sounds like an exciting premise, right? From the prologue, I was hooked, however I get the sense I was catfished. For one instance, I waited the whole novel for Alex to reappear, or maybe he would be the voice of reason; the character that lived through the events and would help the new characters. But nope. Alex is only in the prologue. My guess is that he was just a throw away character to show off the danger of the novel.
So, who is the protagonist then? While there are several characters in this novel, It’s safe to bet the protagonist is Patrick Lahm, a writer on his way to a book signing in Connecticut when the storm comes out of nowhere and he runs out of gas. He is picked up by Father Harold, another character in the book that had prominent focus early on but was subjugated to a background character later. They decide the storm is too intense to drive through, so they stop at the Kurtain Motel for the night, and Harold promises to drive Patrick back to his car to get it re-fueled in the morning.
This is where many of the other characters of the novel are introduced, however I found them to be numerous, and because of that, boring. Most characters I could not keep apart from the next, and when that character would disappear for a few chapters only to pop up later, I had to try to remember who this character was, and what they do again. Most had no personalities to help keep them apart. And only their jobs or what sin they committed was their only traits. We had three people employed at the hotel (the owner, the maintenance man, and the bartender), the actress, the baseball player, another woman (who for the life of me I could not remember what she did, only that it made her very rich) whose only defining trait was that she’s overweight, Patrick the writer, the priest, the hedge fund CFO, and a mother and her son who don’t appear as they seem. As you can read, there’s a lot of characters, and the author tried his best to give them something to keep them apart, but there is just too many to keep track of. Which leads into my next issue.
I don’t care about any of these characters. Many are supposed to be superficial, which makes it believable they would commit these sins, however, nothing they do is redeemable either. The only one I paid attention to, and I think the author did as well, was Patrick. At some moments he can be overly aggressive in his approach, while other times he’s very passive, letting characters around him make decisions.
But enough about characters, this is supposed to be a horror thriller. So, the plot is scary and intense, right? Eh. Without going into spoiler territory, each character is confronted by a sin they committed which is twisted into a horror fashion. And while I think it worked at first, the issue was over saturation. You know how in Jaws, they only showed the shark in small, key moments to emphasize how scary this big shark was? Well, that was not done here. Some moments I think worked really well such as the baseball player’s and Patrick’s first nightmare. These build suspense, and with both of theirs in the beginning of the novel, you ride the high of what’s going on with these characters and why is this happening. However, when the same visions keep coming and not altering in their approach, I started to get bored. I felt like the other shoe was never going to drop, and when you start to lose the interest of the reader, it doesn’t matter how good your climax is. Speaking of which.
*SPOILER ALERT IF YOU EVER WANT TO READ THIS NOVEL OR MORE IN THE SERIES*
You read that right…series. And boy does it feel like it. Just like a pre-planned franchise that has been plaguing our TVs for the last few years, this feels like the author wanted to keep the mystery alive, and thus didn’t want to reveal what was happening to these people. But by not revealing this earlier, I was checked out by time I reached the middle of the book. Towards the end, like the last twenty pages, we get an information dump by the psychic boy that these are Soul Collectors and they want to possess the bodies of sinners, and once the person confesses their sin, the Soul Collector can possess them. My first issue with this is that it came towards the end of the novel, which means this will be a conflict for future novels without giving a fulfilling conclusion to this one, and by saying what they are doesn’t mean it explains just how powerful these things are or if there are multiple. At one point, it seems like these Soul Collectors are great illusionists, and can make their victims see the people they’ve killed, see and feel the constant rain, and even make them believe its constantly night. But its never explained just how far their reach is. Did they really follow Patrick to make him believe his car was broken down? If they are confined to the hotel, then how was Alex (the poor prologue guy) being haunted at an undisclosed diner? If these people were chosen to be victims, why now? Why not attack when they are more isolated? Why attack them in the same hotel a couple of psychics are located at?
Which also brings me to the boy and his mother. Both seem to know what’s going on, and are unaffected by the Soul Collectors, but its never explained why. According to the first two chapters I read, it appears they will play a bigger role in the second novel, but I found them to be deus ex machina. Telling Patrick what to do or where he should go to move the plot along, but not in a meaningful way. The only character they technically help is Patrick, but they leave the others to die. Even after I finished reading the book, I kept thinking if they were omitted, nothing would’ve really changed.
Final Thoughts
This was a very messy novel. I can say I did finish it, but it was a struggle. The way it was wrote also made it difficult. The novel makes the grave mistake of switching from one point of view to another character in the scene (This was done a couple of times, but the author didn’t do this later on) which was jarring. And then, from what I can only guess to make it feel like a movie, he will follow several characters in the same chapter. Sometimes only giving a paragraph to a character, before we swap to a different one. This way of telling the story just shortened the characters’ potential, which made them seem very hollow and not well fleshed out.
I think if we cut out a few characters or merge some characters together to make it a bit snappier, more development could’ve been used to differentiate them. If you want Patrick to be the main character who can maybe see other people’s fears, why not just tell the whole story from his perspective? Why do I need to see the perspective of the actress, when she does nothing in the whole story, and even other characters call her useless later on? This needed to be a contained story. You can have a series, nothing wrong with that, but your story needs to be self-contained. In the first Harry Potter, yes we get the sense that Harry will be battling Voldemort through the whole series, but holes are not left in the story as to who Voldemort could be, or what he might or might not be capable of. The first story is self-contained in finding the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone for us Americans) and stopping someone from getting it and using it for evil.
Even after reading this novel. I still have no idea what they were fighting, how it can be fought, and why it chooses its victims. I was bored, and that’s something you never want your reader to be when its supposed to be a horror/ mystery/ thriller. Overall, I don’t recommend this book. It was a quick read (only about ~150 not counting the last few chapters of the second book), and yet it was a slog about half way through. If you want to give it a go, like art, books are subjective too, maybe you will get more out of it than I did, but I don’t think I will be giving anymore books in this series a read.
I guess I’m confessing my sin of reading this book to the end when I could’ve spent my time elsewhere.