Synopsis
From the author of White Horse (“Twisty and electric.” —The New York Times Book Review) comes a terrifying and resonant novel about a woman who uses her unique gift to learn the truth about her sister’s death.
Olivia Becente was never supposed to have the gift. The ability to commune with the dead was the specialty of her sister, Naiche. But when Naiche dies unexpectedly and under strange circumstances, somehow Olivia suddenly can’t stop seeing and hearing from spirits.
A few years later, she’s the most in-demand paranormal investigator in Denver. She’s good at her job, but the loss of Naiche haunts her. That’s when she hears from the Brown Palace, a landmark Denver hotel. The owner can’t explain it, but every few years, a girl is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. As Olivia tries to understand these disturbing deaths, the past and the present collide as Olivia’s investigation forces her to confront a mysterious and possibly dangerous cult, a vindictive journalist, betrayal by her friends, and shocking revelations about her sister’s secret life.
The Haunting of Room 904 is a paranormal thriller that is as edgy as it is heartfelt and simmers with intensity and longing. Erika T. Wurth lives up to her reputation as “a gritty new punkish outsider voice in American horror.”
Review
Thanks to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for this audiobook arc.
This is my first experience with the author, and I really enjoyed it. This is like a mix between ghost hunting and being a ghost medium, with Olivia having not only the sight, but abilities. She’s like a paranormal detective but also a kind of spirit weaver. The novel opens with her solving a few lesser incidents to get your blood flowing, but they all end up coming back in connection.
When hired to investigate room 904, Olivia is facing far more than just a simple haunting. The room is the place where her sister was last seen alive, before she took her own life, and it’s believed that this is directly linked to the haunting itself. Every year like clockwork a woman checks into the hotel, whether or not they try to lock up room 904 tight, without fail, three weeks later there’s another death. And Olivia’s investigation is hit with another layer of desperation when she finds out her mother has been to the hotel…
The in between is filled with a couple of repetitive beats, where she is struggling back and forth with solving the mystery. There are some shared locations that made it feel like similar things were happening. But I was a really big fan of these small sections at the beginning of chapters that served as little advertisements for different ghost hunting equipment. And as my version was narrated, it added almost a comedic beat to break things up. What was kind of strange to me though, was how much research must have gone into the equipment, when the items themselves take a serious backseat in the story. The author mentions that they are there, or that they are using them, but then it always defaulted to Olivia reaching out with her powers anyway.
The novel deals with indigenous mistreatment and culture erasure, not only in its past plot line of a massacre, but also in the way those around Olivia speak and treat her. There’s this incredibly nasty journalist after her, and she is a great example of the way people speak about American Indians in a way they feel they can claim is not a racial commentary. And I found this not only informational, but a good facsimile for readers of what people actually have to deal with. A solid first read for me.
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