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.”
