The Grand Hotel: A Novel

If your book is described as "HP Lovecraft meets The Shining!" in enthusiastic quotes, then it had better deliver and this...DOES NOT DO SO. This...whatever it was...was so bad I couldn't finish it. I had to stop and just...pause for a moment. I couldn't be reading something this awful and yet! Here I was.

It felt like I was being led on a tour of the worst Dungeons & Dragons game of all time--everything told, nothing shown. After the fourth or fifth Hotel Guest describing the "horrors" of their past life, I just said 'no thanks' and went on about my day, and you know what? I'm totally okay with that. Thank Yog-Sothoth I only paid a dollar.

A novel of fantastic supernatural horror that presents an excellent premise, then follows through and more.

The chillingly genial manager of the Grand Hotel greets a party of guests from various places and takes them on a tour of this venerable building, where histories and stories from across worlds have found their home. Along the way they visit some of the permanent guests and staff of the Grand Hotel, and each one tells a story featuring some inexplicable and supernatural occurrence.

At the end of each, the manager questions a certain guest about the meaning of the story, and the interpretations are literally a matter of life and death. Or worse.

From things the manager lets slip and from the descriptions, it because clear to the reader that the Grand Hotel sits on a kind of nexus of multiple realities, even as it is home to an incredibly wide range of characters.

Meet the hotel detective, a former Chicago cop who encounters the ghosts of gangsters while on stakeout.

A German doctor falls down an old well and is transported to the medieval past. His skills with modern medicine allow him to help others, but his disdain for the superstitious ways of the era yield horrific results when he discovers that the evil spirits of sickness held back by such charms are not all imaginary.

An Australian chef who had starred on a cooking show tries to boost flagging ratings by breaking into the ghost hunter show genre, but cooking native dishes in a purportedly haunted castle in Scotland attracts horrific attention.

A psychologist’s case notes hint that madness may be contagious, or else the world is a more uncanny place than the rational mind can bear.

A simple English vicar must play detective when he learns one of his parishioners is being haunted and a paranormal ‘expert’ may be running a con job, or the ghosts themselves might have a scheme in mind.

An Italian musician finds her viola has uncanny properties, and attracts uncanny fans.

Pay close attention, because if you don’t get the meaning behind each story, you may not live to hear the next.

Best of all is the sense of unease, never overstated, but that builds and builds. With every chapter the tension mounts and more hapless guests lose their way, vanishing into the labyrinthine halls and stories of the Grand Hotel.

I feel I have to reread it, since I was so eager to find out what happens next that I probably didn’t get all the themes and connections, but all were excellent, chilling little gets, twists on classic ghost stories with a brilliant framing device. This is my first time reading this author, and it’s a shame most of his other work seems to be zombie fiction, which I don’t personally care for, but he is definitely on my list of writers to watch.

Cannot understand how this book has so many 5 star ratings. Some of the stories that are told by the various residents of the hotel are fairly interesting, but the writing weaving them together is poor. I only finished it because I thought there might be some great revelation by the end...nope.

Not thrilled with the book...basically it's a collection of random people in a hotel with their stories. Not at all what I was expecting....

This one never quite worked the way it wanted to. The format is a good one, but a huge problem is that none of the characters telling the stories within the story had distinctive voices. They all spoke in the same excessively formal pseudo-Victorian cadence as the prime narrator. The stories varied in quality, but none of them truly popped the way great short stories do, and the one that pulled off a great twist did so in the middle, allowing the narrative to just kind of peter out. An interesting experiment, but I can't recommend this one.

It is a very quick and easy read, but it seems under-developed. You spend the entire novel believing that you are being built up for something, but the final release is very underwhelming. Not a terrible read, but not a classic either.

The Grand Hotel by bestselling author Scott Kenemore is a mind bending thriller fecund with fascination and enthrallment. More than just Genre Fiction, Kenemore echoes his predecessors Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley as his work ebbs away from the mere horrific and bleeds into literary fiction. Shown though Kenemore's rich characterizations and resounding themes, The Grand Hotel is no doubt a work with a greater intention than mere shock value.

Inspired by The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie, the novel is told as an adventure of sorts. The chief narrator is the hotel's desk clerk who begins the story by telling the way in which visitors often arrive at the Grand Hotel. He slowly slips from talking about a generic group of visitors to talking about a very particular group of visitors, those who the reader will follow through the rest of the novel. The desk clerk always wants to take visitors on a tour of the hotel, and that is precisely what he convinces this batch to do.

At each of the destinations the desk clerk takes the visitors, there is a permanent resident with a story to share. These stories are ridden with horror, death and often misguided actions on the part of the narrator as well as characters within the story. Each story is profoundly unique, yet each tends toward the supernatural and the weird.

At each stop the tour loses more and more guests. Often a guest will decide to stay with a resident they find particularly interesting, whose story they are particularly fond of. As the group continues and begins to dwindle, a young red haired girl of about twelve years old begins to stand out to the desk clerk. The desk clerk is highly intrigued by the girl's intelligence and insight and decides to play a game with her. He asks her one question about each story the group hears and challenges her to answer correctly or else he threatens to end the tour. Each question tends to revolve around character morality, and the clerk is continually shocked by the young girl's perceptive answers.

At its end the book plunges into an extremely unforeseen abyss and turns the entire story on its head. It's not only what "happens" in the book, but rather the moral bend of the story that is endearing and twists the heart a bit. Kenemore's novel is not only well-written, original and magnificently laid out, but it is one of deep insight and leaves readers with a profound sense of compassion.

The author's rant against Americans. Blah blah blah. This could have been a good novel. Instead the author uses this book as a platform for preaching his viewpoint that Americans are bad people.

I enjoyed reading The Grand Hotel, by Scott Kenemore. I think my favorite character was the main character, from whom’s perspective most of the story is told. Is he hotel management, a demon, or even a devil? You’re never really sure until the end. Some of the stories told within the book (narrated by hotel guests) didn’t grab my attention quite as much as the story of the main character...and his relationship to one other character in particular.

It was a fun read, and I was able to create the hotel (and it’s inhabitants) fully in my imagination. There were a few slow parts within the different stories that unfolded, but I think that had more to do with the fact that I just wanted to learn more about the main character. I can’t tell you his name...he wouldn’t like that very much.

This book took me way too long to get interested in. Usually, I can start reading a novel and by the second day, I am almost if not always on my way to completing the novel. Not this one. I felt as if I was reading a bunch of haphazardly put together tales, with a terrible ending. Big disappointment!!! Mr. Kenmore could've done so much more with this ending, what a let down....