The Invisible Hotel

February 1, 2024
In the wake of her father's accidental death a year earlier, Yewon canceled a much-anticipated study course in Australia. She continues to live with her mother in their small South Korean village, where tradition mandates that people keep their relatives' bones in their bathtubs, washing them regularly and laboring to give birth while lying on top of them. Her part-time convenience store job recently ended, Yewon agrees to drive an elderly North Korean woman several hours to visit her brother in prison, though the woman's panic attacks unsettle her. At the same time, Yewon is troubled by nightmares about a mysterious hotel and begins to suspect that her dreams may be connected to real-world terrors. Meanwhile rumors swirl about hostilities between North and South heating up, even as shadows of wartime atrocities from the past loom large over their region. Ham's immersive and atmospheric novel reflects on the horrors of postwar trauma for individuals, families, and communities. Recommend to readers who enjoyed The Hole, (2017) by Hye-young Pyun, I Am the River (2018), by T. E. Grau, or Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police (2019).

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2024
A young woman struggling to find her way in South Korea wrestles with the generational grief of a country torn asunder. This ethereal debut novel, at once a horror story and a bird's bone-delicate exploration of trauma, is filled with ghosts. Like many of the menaces imagined here, the story never fully materializes, but that doesn't prevent the atmosphere from being chilling. Our narrator is Yewon, a young South Korean woman. She has some school under her belt and dreams of going to college in Australia or living in a real city like Seoul instead of the small town where she's just finished her last day at a dead-end job and lives with her disparaging mother. Yewon's running monologue is straight-laced, but Ham somehow conjures up a delicious tension among her lead's longing to become something, the little tragedies unfolding around her, and the spooky aftereffects of the Korean War. There's Yewon's sister, who is pregnant and getting a divorce from her husband. Broadening her horizons are her best friend, Min, and Tae-kwun, a young engineering student she dates. There's not much time for fun, though. There's the old North Korean woman Yewon agrees to drive to a prison to visit her brother, which reminds Yewon that her own brother, Jae-hyun, is stationed at a military base close to the DMZ. There's her father, dead from a factory explosion in Saudi Arabia. Most of all, there's her mother ritually washing the bones of their ancestors in the bathtub where Yewon was born. All of these simmering tensions lead to Yewon's increasingly frightening visions of the titular hotel: "I was a guest. Traveling far from home, come to a foreign place. A stranger to where I arrived. Though I don't remember coming to a hotel or traveling at all. I don't want a room. I need to get out." An intriguing debut--not a story of war, but of a nightmarish visit to its echo chamber.

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