The Grand Hotel

Inspired by the Sanskrit classic The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie, this stagey fantasy novel unfolds as a series of first-person narratives told by residents of the creepy Grand Hotel to visitors on a tour being lead by “Vic,” the hotel’s enigmatic front desk clerk. Most involve a brush with the fantastic—a doctor travels back to medieval times to treat the sick with modern medicine, a police officer sees his partner’s ghost spirited away by the specters of a haunted apartment building—that sometimes verges on the ludicrous, such as when a television chef cooks in the world’s most haunted places. Kennemore (Zombie, Indiana) presents these stories as parables that Vic tells an unnamed tourist, but their shaggy-dog character makes their lessons feel forced. A final tale reveals Vic’s identity and the underlying purpose of his tour, but the “whole” that it suggests is barely equal to the sum of this novel’s parts. (Oct.)