"The Sundown Motel" Is One Of The Best Novels I Read This Year

The 2020 thriller “The Sun Down Motel” does a lot of things right.  In brings in creepy elements that are closer to a supernatural horror, but without them overwhelming the whole overall narrative to the point it feels out of place. The author Simone St James also heavily uses the 1^st/3^rd person narration technique. Her chapters are long enough to make me feel attached to both narration styles, which sometimes can be a problem with that writing technique. The 1^st/3^rd person narration pick is just a personal presence of mine as a reader but I understand it’s use in the thriller genre.

The story concerns a young women in upstate New York named Viv Delaney in 1982, who stops at a creepy motel , and ends up working there on the night shift. As she works there, she comes across a ton of creepy characters, including a salesman she suspects of being a serial killer of women. The other half of the novel takes place in 2017, where the niece she never met, Carly Kirk, comes to the now run down town in upstate to investigate the disappearance of the aunt she never met. While there, she meets a cute boy, meets a college girl who goes to a local school, and a bunch of older folks who knew her aunt back in the day. She too ends up working the night shift at the Sundown Motel. While the younger folks seem like your run of the mill college kids running around upstate New York, the older folks seem more like your salt of the earth people from the real upstate New York. I was happy to see upstate New York as a setting in a novel, because as someone who lived 10 or so years there, I can tell you it truly an interesting place and very different from down state. It’s the part of New York that isn’t iconic but is instead just a long high way drive up to Canada, and you see some interesting and weird places along the way. This book does nail that.

The ghost elements of the hotel are never too much, but are there, and adds to the creepy feeling of the place, as motels in general have a creepiness to them. The diners and movie theatres and strip malls on the side of the highway also adds to the overall upstate feeling. The pacing did keep me turning pages because I never really knew what exactly made the aunt disappear, nor if her niece was getting any closer to the truth. One of my favorite characters was the older upstate New York cop who knew her aunt back in the day, and wasn’t eager to give off too many details.

This was a excellent thriller, and one of the best books I read this year. I recommend reading it. This book did nail the night shift. Overall, this aunt and niece’s experience as the all night clerks at the Sundown Motel reflect the feeling I had as a all night guard in upstate New York much closer, and nails that creepy feeling of what it’s like to be in a place no one is really thinking about beyond the little corner of the universe you are in. Also the end I didn’t see coming, and it was excellent.