The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isn’t right at the motel, something haunting and scary.
Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. Carly decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.
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This book was spectacularly chilling. Just what I was looking for after reading so many heartwarming/fluffy books this spring. I like thrillers, but usually only if I KNOW that they’re going to scare me. Like actually scare me. This book definitely did the trick in the creepy department. It wasn’t as thrilling as I’d hoped. I feel like some mysteries were answered way too quick, however, even after knowing the “what” behind why the Sun Down is so terrifying, I liked the conclusions. One thing that I don’t think get’s talked about with this book enough however is that it IS a ghost story. Yes there’s real life danger outside of the ghost aspect but there ARE ghosts. So, if that’s not your thing, be warned. However, I found it was handled very well and fit in seamlessly with the plot. I really enjoyed the setting (reminiscent of Psycho) and the timeline jumps. Even though it wasn’t as terrifying for the second half of the book as I’d hoped, I still really enjoyed the story and it definitely had all the creepy vibes.
We start off the story with Viv on the night she disappears in 1982. The beginning is full of mystery and from the very first lines you know something bad is about to happen. Then we jump to 2017 where Carly, her niece, begins to follow the same path her aunt did so many years before. As we continue through the book, we continue switching timelines between the two women as we lead up to what really happened that fateful night in 1982. I usually don’t like time jumps, they can be done very poorly and I hate getting close to answers and then LEAVING to another timeline where we start from scratch. However, this book did it better than any book I’ve read up to this point in my life. I found the transitions so seamless that sometimes I had to stop and correct myself as to what timeline we were in. As soon as we left Viv on the cusp of discovering something, we’d switch to Carly where she was making that same discovery in present day. I liked how the story continued on and didn’t back-peddle like a lot of timeline jumps do. We’re the reader, if we discovered it in one timeline, we don’t need to rediscover it with a new character in a new timeline. This helped the story progress very quickly and kept me on my toes.
I really enjoyed the flashbacks, however, Viv seemed unreal to me. Her motivations were strange and I felt like a lot of her actions were contrary to the characterization she was given. I was disappointed that she seemed so out of reach to the reader, especially since we spent a good portion of the book reading from her point of view. I know it was maybe to make us feel like she was just as much as a ghost to us as she was to Carly but there are ways to keep a character mysterious without making them completely unreachable. I did relate a lot to Carly. Her search for answers had a lot more motivation behind them and her actions were much easier to understand making her an easier character to relate to and empathize with. I liked Carly’s timeline a little better because she was basically solving two mysteries at the same time. How her aunt disappeared, and whatever it was that her aunt had discovered before we vanished. The side characters were great as well. I wish we had a little bit more background on some of them but they felt very multi-dimensional to me. I especially liked Heather, Carly’s roommate as I felt she embodied all the murderinos like us.
Overall I really enjoyed this book. It’s not as suspenseful as expected but it definitely lived up to the “creepy” factor and for that I will highly recommend it. There’s nothing better in the summer than a creepy thriller based around a small roadside hotel to keep you company. 4 stars.