If you are looking for a book with just the right amount of the bizarre, look no further than Peter Cameron’s latest novel. Set in an unforgivingly cold northern European city, What Happens at Night is quite a tasty little atmospheric tale.
Let loose of reality for a moment and allow your mind to conjure up the following scene … An unnamed couple has traveled many days from New York City to a remote locale for one simple purpose: to adopt a child. “The woman,” as she is called throughout, is battling cancer, questioning if her husband (“the man”) truly wants her to live, and coming to terms with her own impending death. This distant orphanage is their last hope to have a family; for, no one else will allow a couple in such a precarious situation to bring a child into their home.
Sounds more or less mundane so far, right? Well, this is where things start to get a bit strange …
Upon arriving at their destination the couple checks into a palatial old hotel unlike any they have seen before. The size of the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel dwarfs the few guests the man and the woman cross paths with. As his wife lays down to rest following the long, difficult journey, the man wanders down to the hotel bar where, one by one, he meets an interesting cast of characters: A bartender who plies hotel guests with locally concocted schnapps, which immediately appeals to the man. An ageing former actress who resides in the hotel and is full of impossible tales. A businessman who claims to know the man and is hell-bent on seducing him. And a local faith healer who may just offer hope for the woman’s terminal illness.
Not since the Overlook have readers encountered a hotel as hauntingly captivating as the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. Albeit with notably less blood and gore, Cameron masterfully constructs a labyrinth of mystery and suspense, drama and intrigue, with this larger-than-life character — and its inhabitants — at the core. As the story progresses and reality dissolves, so does the marriage of the man and the woman, giving way to nimble explorations of the nebulous line between love and hate, the harsh realities of life juxtaposed with the simple joys, the connections we form with others and the things we come to learn about ourselves.
After penning eight other novels, Cameron knows exactly what he is doing here. He draws the reader in just as much with the words he keeps unsaid as with those he puts on the page. Leaving only the two main characters without names allows the man and the woman to remain enigmatic in many ways, strangers in a land where everyone else appears to be quietly settled into their own roles. There is also no need for pretentious, self-indulgent language here — Cameron’s crisp, often spare prose constructs this unusual world and its singular atmosphere perfectly. Sliding subtly out of the realm of the concrete and into the surreal with every page turned, What Happens at Night is a rare journey that will leave the reader both unsettled and utterly satisfied.
What Happens at Night is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore. Many thanks to Catapult for providing me with an advance copy of this absolutely amazing book. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
An atmospheric, suspenseful story of a couple’s struggle to adopt a baby, while staying in a fading, grand European hotel. (Think: Barton Fink crossed with Patricia Highsmith)
In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.
The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavored schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself. What Happens at Night is a “masterpiece” (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by “an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer” (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
