Extended Stay
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A gothic horror novel about the American Dream
In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.
After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?
Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martinez's impressive debut—part of the University of Arizona's Camino del Sol series, which spotlights Latinx authors—reads like a collaboration between Lewis Carroll and H.P. Lovecraft, from an idea by Stephen King. After Alvaro and Carmen's parents are butchered by rebels in Colombia, the siblings flee to the U.S. Alvaro, 17, and Carmen, 13, wind up stuck in Las Vegas, where Alvaro initially believes he's lucky to get a job in the kitchen of the rundown Alicia Hotel and Casino. Mr. B., the manager, even offers the young people a free hotel room to live in. But Mr. B. has plans for Alvaro—and so does the Alicia itself. The decaying structure is part of a vast subterranean entity, the Face Beneath the Face, and it's constantly growing by sprouting increasingly hideous rooms and consuming hotel guests. With nowhere to run, will Alvaro and Carmen capitulate to the hotel's sinister demands? Martinez skillfully mixes the grounded dread of the grieving siblings' experiences as impoverished and undocumented immigrants with more surreal horrors. The low-key prose will keep readers from looking away, even when events become over-the-top ghastly. This is a fresh and stunning winner.
