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Summary
Summary
A chilling fable about a family marooned in a snowbound town whose grievous history intrudes on the dreamlike present.
The Addisons -- Julia and Tonio, ten-year-old Dewey, and derelict Uncle Robbie -- are driving home, cross-country, after collecting Robbie from yet another trip to rehab. When a terrifying blizzard strikes outside the town of Good Night, Idaho, they seek refuge in the town at the Travelers Rest, a formerly opulent but now crumbling and eerie hotel where the physical laws of the universe are bent.
Once inside the hotel, the family is separated. As Julia and Tonio drift through the maze of the hotel's spectral interiors, struggling to make sense of the building's alluring powers, Dewey ventures outward to a secret-filled diner across the street. Meanwhile, a desperate Robbie quickly succumbs to his old vices, drifting ever further from the ones who love him most.
With each passing hour, dreams and memories blur, tearing a hole in the fabric of our perceived reality and leaving the Addisons in a ceaseless search for one another. At each turn a mysterious force prevents them from reuniting, until at last Julia is faced with an impossible choice.
Can this mother save her family from the fate of becoming Souvenirs -- those citizens trapped forever in magnetic Good Night -- or, worse, from disappearing entirely? With the fearsome intensity of a ghost story, the magical spark of a fairy tale, and the emotional depth of the finest family sagas, Keith Lee Morris takes us on a journey beyond the realm of the known. Featuring prose as dizzyingly beautiful as the mystical world Morris creates, Travelers Rest is both a mind-altering meditation on the nature of consciousness and a heartbreaking story of a family on the brink of survival.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
Alice in Wonderland meets The Shining when four travelers are stranded in Good Night, Idaho, during a freak blizzard. There is something seductive about the Travelers Rest hotel. For Julia Addison, it is settling into an oddly familiar bed in the hotel and dreaming, beyond worry about her husband and son. And for her husband, Tonio, there is a mysterious blonde woman in silver shoes whom he follows, leaving their son, Dewey, behind. Dewey is unimpressed by this strange hotel in this strange town where the snow never seems to stop falling. Sure, he receives more chocolate pie than he could ever eat from the rough but sympathetic owners of the diner, but the novelty of having no parents to whom he must report quickly wears thin. And then there's Uncle Robbie, fresh from rehab, who looks at the whole adventure as a chance to go on the binge of a lifetime and finally cut ties with his responsible older brother. Mostly they flit in and out of their separate experiences that seem to take place in varying times and places, though occasionally one character will catch a ghostly glimpse of another. As the truth begins to come out about Good Night's history and the Addisons' role in it, there is ultimately a rather satisfactory answer to most of the mystery and questions and flashbacks. Morris (Call It What You Want, 2010, etc.) insists on using epigraphs from Proust throughout the book, which detracts from rather than adds to the novel's own illustration of the themes of memory and reality. Though a bit slow to begin, because the characters find themselves lost before we even get to know them, the novel gradually proves itself weighty, suspenseful, and even wistful. The physics of Good Night might be questionable, but the lasting impact on the characters is rather poignant. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
