I heard The Hotel before I read it – Daisy Johnson’s second short story collection was broadcast on Radio 4, at night, during a Covid lockdown. The 15 gothic tales went out over several weeks and were beautifully produced, summoning the uncanny atmosphere of the Fens, the lost, broken, female narrators like ghosts coming over the airwaves on those bleak winter evenings. Johnson has always been about atmosphere: her prose slops and shifts, weird and unsettling, asking you to check your footing with each step into her marshy world.
The stories are linked by place first of all. The Fenland hotel is built on a site that already has something cursed about it: “the earth… looks as if darkness itself has slipped from the sky and filled the ground”. A woman who was thought a witch had been drowned there and now haunts the place. “This land and I share some similarities,” she tells us in the first story, “this land knows the way I know, this land can see everything, it can see us and what lies ahead.”
The tales build and magnify, reflecting and working in eerie harmony on the reader as we are drawn deeper into the hotel’s mysterious world. The most obvious point of comparison is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but Johnson is a more accomplished stylist than Jackson, her sentences more elegant and impactful, her project more ambitious and literary. Folk horror from MR James through The Wicker Man to the likes of Andrew Michael Hurley and Zoe Gilbert is another clear influence. What Johnson adds to this lineage is a fierce interrogation of women’s roles within these types of tales. All of the stories are narrated by women and there is a sense that the hotel is a prison and a means of escape for them.
I last encountered Johnson’s words spoken by Helena Bonham Carter in Punchdrunk’s brilliantly immersive Viola’s Room. There, she used the power of suggestion, the dark edges of fairytales, the way we are all haunted by our own pasts to create a work of extraordinary power. The Hotel is equally striking: it should be read at night, with the lights low, in one sitting.
• The Hotel by Daisy Johnson is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer buy a copy at guardianbooks.com. Delivery charges may apply
