The Hotel [Book Tour with Excerpt]

Welcome to one of the November 21st stops on the blog tour for The Hotel series by Jennifer Anne Gordon, organized by Silver Dagger Book Tours. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for other excerpt spotlights, reviews, guest posts by the author, and a giveaway! (More on that at the end of this post.)

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From Daylight to Madness
The Hotel Book One
by Jennifer Anne Gordon

Published 20 August 2020
by Livre Maison

Genre: Psychological Suspense, Gothic Horror
Page Count: 229
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

The latest book from the critically acclaimed author of Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent; Jennifer Anne Gordon.

On an almost uninhabitable rocky island off the coast of Maine, a Hotel looms over the shore, an ever-present gray lady that stands strong like a guard, keeping watch. For many who come here, this island is a sanctuary and a betrayal.

This is a place where memories linger like ghosts, and the ephemeral nature of time begins to peel away… like the sanity of all who have been unlucky enough to step foot on its shore.

In the late spring of 1873, Isabelle gave birth to her son Oscar, he cried for three startling minutes, and then went silent. During the months that follow, Isabelle is drugged and lulled into an almost hallucinatory world of grief and fear. Her life begins to feel as though it exists in a terrifying new reality separated from those around her…

When her grieving begins to make her husband, Henry, uncomfortable, he and his mother conspire to send Isabelle away to a Summer Hotel on Dagger Island, where she can rest and heal. While they are adamant that the hotel is not an asylum and that Isabelle will be able to return eventually to her home, Isabelle understands in her heart that it is all a lie. That perhaps, everything about being a woman in this time, may have always been a lie.

Her family has lied to her, and she has lied to herself.

The Hotel, of course, is not what it seems, and the foreboding Dagger Island begins to feel more like a prison than a retreat. Isabelle hears relentless sounds coming from the attic above her room, and the ever-present cries of small children scream in her head almost constantly. Are they hallucinations, or are they connected to the small cemetery she found, filled with the fresh dirt of little graves, the brokenhearted reminders of people that no one believes ever existed?

She meets a fellow guest at the Hotel, a young, enigmatic, and deeply damaged priest, named Francis.

Together they teeter on the edges of reality and try desperately to become free from the fates that their pasts have bound them to.

From Daylight to Madness is a poetic, and haunting Gothic Fiction novel that is both profoundly unsettling and darkly romantic.

Currently on sale in Kindle eBook format for $0.99 USD!

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From Daylight to Madness

Prologue

April 1873

He cried for about three minutes, his little voice sounded powerful at first, fighting, and strong. His cries found their way to her ears, which had always been so desperate for love. His strange sounds immediately sounded like home, and like love, but those sounds very quickly changed. Of course, it all happened so fast, she did not even know it was a ‘him’ at this point. It was just crying, just screaming.

            Just home.

There was an almost immediate feeling of removal, followed by a rush of emotion, pain, and even more blood. So much so, that the expulsion of this texture felt as though she were still giving birth. She did not even realize her part in all of this was done. She had done ‘what she could’ and the rest was up to God.

He made guttural sounds, uneven, jagged bursts. Gasping sounds that seemed to grow muffled, as if there were a thick viscous liquid poured down his throat. It was a drowning of sorts; the irony was that he was drowning outside of her. He was drowning on this crisp spring night in the slightly dusty and salt-tinged air of Portland Maine.

It was painful to her, those begging breaths that seemed to reach out and grasp. The pain was not real, not in a physical sense, not anymore. But the emotional pain, she was beginning to feel it now. In the seemingly endless minutes that passed, she had already come to know his sounds. Those frenzied sounds, the way they stampeded into her, she knew she would feel this forever. They were carved into her like initials on the old Oak tree in the small yard of the poorhouse where she grew up. She knew that the echo of these cries would last years. Their scars would grow pale over time but would always be there, marking her memory; these little auditory footprints that would feel like kicks insides of her.

The part of her that made him, that held him inside her body, was scarred now. Ruined.

There was pain for months before this. It went unsaid. It was ‘to be expected.’ At her age, there should have always been ‘some discomfort.’ She mentioned it, or at least she thought she must have when she would visit her physician. His office was an uncomfortable and dusty room located in the back of the Apothecary.

            During her visits, she would describe what she was feeling inside of her. She said it was like butterflies at first, the kicking, the movement . . . but over time it dwindled. The butterflies became moths, and eventually they were just dust in a jar, on a shelf, inside of her body.

She is not quite as sure now, she is trying to remember, and maybe she never mentioned it at all, or at least not enough. She should have made it clearer, made her voice heard; the feeling that something inside her took a wrong turn, that it somehow went wrong. She should have said that the excited feeling she had deep below her belly, was still there, but it felt slower; did she say that? And if she said it, did they hear her; was she heard?

            Did they care? Worse, did she care?

She thought she would not be able to take the sound anymore, the plaintive and desperate cries from this small creature that lived inside her, it was too much. Could none of them do anything to make it stop? She tried to push herself out of the bed. She tried in vain to reach for something that was not there, that was never there.

            Love.

She imagined the hands, the small fingers almost like cats’ claws. She wanted to feel the sharp nasty cuts from this kitten of hers. This little thing filled with so much fear, anger, and love, that in its excitement it hurt her. It reached out and scratched. It bit.

            She bled.

But as she sat up, the room swam around her and the darkness crept in front the corners. It almost overtook her, which was when she noticed it; the sudden silence. She let herself fall back onto the bed as the early morning light turned from daylight to madness, and then of course, there was nothing, there was nothing at all.

            Her hair which had been soaked with sweat, now hung cool and damp against her face. The blood soaking the sheets, which were warm only moments ago, began to thicken in the cool air and feel stiff against her skin.

Isabelle thought it would all be different, she imagined throughout these not quite nine months that the room would be warm, that someone would have thought to light candles. She always pictured a healing fire in the fireplace in the corner of the largest room, in their small house. She could imagine Henry’s face, it would be warm, appreciative, it would seem almost, if not quite exactly, to look like love. This expression of his, it would live in the house next to where love would be, if it had only ever moved in, adjacent to it, holding its hand, living with it. A feeling next to love.

He would hand her the baby and Henry would say, “Here he is, our boy, our Oscar.”

It was not nine months. No, of course, it was not. It was seven, maybe seven and a half – she should know. She should have always known the exactness of it, the moment of conception. The moment that she would be more than just a ‘her,’ the moment she would be a mother, the thing she was always expected to be, and until now, and even now . . . was not.

            She did not know; she did not know any of this. She was a mother, who now was not. What is that called? Is there a name for that; the silent grief, the mourning that is best ignored, tidied away, lest it make someone uncomfortable?

There was blood on the floor, it was mixed with tissue, there were pieces of her, and pieces of Oscar. She thought perhaps his little hands had held onto something inside of her and pulled it out on his way. As if he knew, it was not his time to leave.

            She closed her eyes, and a cry filled the air.

            His cries, Oscar’s cries, not hers; Isabelle had not cried.

            Not yet.

There would be an inexpensive grave that simply read, ‘Baby Boy,’ when it should have said his name; a name that her husband would want to save for ‘the next one.’ As if this one was not real. As if a life existing in three small minutes somehow meant less than a life lived in thirty years.

            This thing that happened, she could almost hear the neighbors whispering about it, their voices thick with judgement and colored on the ends with fear. Whispering about the birth that did not happen, the baby that did not live.

            The life that never happened – except it did.

There was Oscar; he was there, for three minutes. There were no loving looks, no warmth of candles and dim soothing firelight. There was pain. There was blood. There was relief.

            There was three minutes of crying.

            There was Oscar.

            Then, then, there was nothing.

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When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk
The Hotel Book Two
by Jennifer Anne Gordon

Published 19 November 2020
by Livre Maison

Genre: Psychological Suspense, Gothic Horror
Page Count: 206
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

In one startling moment in the late summer of 1873 a tragedy fell like summer sun on the gray jagged shores of Dagger Island. Francis loses everything he thought his life was, and what it could have become. His heart breaks and his feet run, all the way back to his childhood home, he reaches for a past that may not exist.

He is there, in the little house in Dorchester Neck. A place haunted with missing time. He feels the comfort from walls that lean in too close, but then …He feels the trauma that ripped his life in two and in a blink of an eye he is back at the hotel. He can feel the memories fade as the cold fingers of winter wrap around him. He does not know how he got there, or indeed if he ever left.

Francis has lived his whole life veiled in the memories that are more alive than his present. The current days fade away before he can hold on to him. Everything he was or thought he could have been is gone. He realizes he may be a monster, and the person he has fallen in love with may not even exist. Francis holds onto the memories he thinks are real …until he is almost consumed by them.

Francis is isolated in a world of mesmerism, with his tormentor and healer Doctor Hughes.

Francis is a guest in this hotel with his past, his present, and who he believes to be his future. Isabelle. His world is a labyrinth … he feels her hand in his. The fingers intertwine and there is nothing left but her …

She is a memory, a ghost, and a hallucination.

He can almost remember the moment when his father’s glass shattered into his face…he can almost remember who he was before he was broken in two.

He can almost remember…

He can almost…

He can…

He…

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JENNIFER ANNE GORDON is a professional ballroom dancer and choreographer by day, and a curly haired neurotic writer by night. She is an actor, a traveler, a photographer, a lover of Gothic Horror, and a dog mom. She lives in the wilds of New Hampshire with her partner on and off the dance floor. Her novels include the Kindle Award for Horror 2020 Winning book, Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent, as well as the historical Gothic novel From Daylight to Madness (The Hotel #1) as well as When The Sleeping Dead Still Talk (The Hotel #2). She also has a published collection of her artwork, titled “Victoriana {mixed media art of jennifer anne gordon}.

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One lucky follower of the tour will win:
* An autographed copy of Jennifer’s novel Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent (finalist for the kindle awards for horror 2020)
* An autographed copy of Jennifer’s art book Victoriana: mixed media art of Jennifer Anne Gordon, and
* A $15 Amazon Gift Card
Remember to visit other stops on the tour for more chances to enter. Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway.

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