Are you a fan of haunted hotel tales like The Shining, ranked by The Guardian newspaper as arguably the fifth “best horror film of all time”? The film is based on a Stephen King novel that King wrote after visiting the real-life spooky Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. Guests and staff at the Stanley have long reported ghostly occurrences at the hotel, like being touched by an invisible presence, hearing voices, smelling fragrant pastry, and even feeling a chilly intruder crawl into their double bed.

The Stanley Hotel might be a famous haunted landmark, but it’s not the only hotel on the list. There’s the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, said to be haunted by Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and other rambunctious spirits. Literary greats are said to haunt the Hotel Monteleone in NOLA. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams have all appeared at the rotating Carousel Bar in spirit.

If you’d like to read another tale about a haunted hotel, the Meridian Inn, located on the outskirts of Indianapolis, it’s as easy as buying a copy of my novel, Love Lets Us Down, published in 2015 by All Nations Press and still inspiring goose bumps. For more about the novel, I’m including a review written by Jim Matthews and published in Kestrel, Spring 2016.

“Kindred Spirits” by Jim Matthews

For the first hundred pages, Suzanne Heagy’s Love Lets Us Down does not feel like a novel but a series of short stories that share only a location, the Meridian Inn, a slowly decaying motel in anonymous suburban Indianapolis. A few of the characters never do leave the isolation of their own tales, but as Heagy begins to weave her narrative tapestry together, even those seemingly random threads contribute to a powerful and affecting picture of human beings struggling to find meaningful connection with each other.

Slowly and deliberately, Heagy takes the time each story and each character needs, from the virginal bride killed on her wedding night who takes forty years to get to the motel, to the woman whose assignation with an old lover proves that some things lost are lost forever. The searching souls at the Meridian Inn cross paths, but those intersections have the feel of real life happenstance, never pulling the reader out of the story, never feeling plotted. None of the easy paths are taken; no narrative shorthand is employed. When a fifteen-year-old girl, who is clearly looking for trouble, demands to sleep in the family van in the parking lot, all of the clichés of crime fiction rush to mind, but the actual trouble she finds is less dramatic, more real, the kind most teenage girls are more likely to find than a serial killer or rapist prowling the night.

With admirable control, all of the elements of Heagy’s prose are sublimated to her powerful characterizations. Her style doesn’t draw attention to itself. Even passages that strike the reader with their beauty stay firmly within a character’s point of view, like the night desk clerk’s musings on the beauty of underlit, chemically treated pool water. The greatest strength of this novel, however, lies in the detailed specificity of its many voices. Love Lets Us Down displays a remarkable range of perspectives on a wide array of life situations, from an elderly widower hauling himself two hundred miles to his wife’s grave while lamenting his daughter’s remoteness and selfish lack of concern for him, to a lost young woman who seeks to forget her aimlessness in booze, pot, and sex. Every one of these characters has a specific voice, and Heagy’s strong control over those voices never wavers. Inner musings shift seamlessly to conversational dialogue and back, as happens in real life. Heagy’s sharp, perceptive observations about human folly and failure always remain firmly within the limitations of the character who delivers them. Her dialogue always feels natural and appropriate in both rhythm and diction.

All of these qualities make for a novel that pulls you in and makes you feel the desperate need of these characters, whose fellow human beings are failing them. Anyone who has recognized that a relationship will never get better than it is right now will sympathize. Anyone who has made the best of a bad situation will recognize kindred spirits. Not all of Heagy’s resolutions are emotionally satisfying, but then how often are they in our non-fictional lives? The Meridian Inn looks a whole lot like a place we’ve all been. Love Lets Us Down only lets us down when we realize that the twenty-four hours of the novel are over. We know these people’s lives will continue on; we just won’t be there to see it. Surely that is what the best of fiction strives to achieve.

Much gratitude to Jim for the lovely review. If you’re looking for a good ghost story to read during the Halloween season, you can buy a signed copy of Love Lets Us Down for $10, postage included, through Venmo or PayPal. To make a purchase, please send a message to LLUDnovel@yahoo.com for more information.

“One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—/ One need not be a House—”

–Emily Dickinson