DAISY JOHNSON THE HOTEL
‘Read at night, with the lights low, in one sitting’ OBSERVER
‘A new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction’ LAUREN GROFF
PRAISE FOR THE HOTEL
‘Striking . . . The tales build and magnify, reflecting and working in eerie harmony on the reader as we are drawn deeper into the hotel’s mysterious world’ Observer
‘Haunting . . . Daisy Johnson returns with a collection of modern horror stories with a singular setting’ Vogue
‘Johnson has given us a deftly constructed new version of a horror collection, with stories that slip in like mist under the door . . . But like all the best horror stories, they have deep roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted’ Guardian
‘Brilliantly chilling’
Marie Claire
‘Spend an eerie night at this haunted literary hotel’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Lovers of horror will devour this book . . . The contemporary literary scene would be a poorer place without Daisy Johnson around’ Financial Times
‘As splendidly written as it is haunting’ i Paper
PRAISE FOR DAISY JOHNSON
‘Daisy Johnson is one of the best writers in this country . . . An astonishing stylist’
Max Porter
‘Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King’ Observer
‘To read Daisy Johnson is to have that rare feeling of meeting an author you’ll read for the rest of your life’
Evie Wyld
‘There are few writers as talented as Daisy. After reading Sisters, I binged on Fen and Everything Under and am now obsessed’
Elizabeth Macneal
‘Dive in for just a moment and you’ll emerge gasping and haunted’
Celeste Ng
‘The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising . . . Her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud’ Economist
‘A profoundly inventive and masterful storyteller’ i Paper
DAISY JOHNSON
Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel, Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.
ALSO BY DAISY JOHNSON
Fen
Everything
Under Sisters
DAISY JOHNSON
The Hotel
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First published in Vintage in 2025
First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 2024
Copyright © Daisy Johnson 2024
The moral right of the author has been asserted
These stories were originally commissioned by and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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The Hotel
This is what we know about The Hotel:
It is bigger on the inside than the outside. Do not go into Room 63.
Doors and windows do not stay in the same places.
The Hotel listens when you speak.
The Hotel watches.
The Hotel knows everything about you. The Hotel knew you before you arrived.
The Hotel looks different to different people. We’ll be at The Hotel soon.
The Hotel is familiar.
The Hotel is a stranger in an alley.
It is difficult to find information about The Hotel online and a degree of patience is needed. The language used to write about The Hotel is difficult, tangled. Websites spring up rife with stories and soon become pitted with absences, sentences which begin and end nowhere, vanishing punctuation. In a book on haunted British buildings there is a chapter on The Hotel which is pulled before publication and never read by anyone. Photographs of The Hotel have
a habit of going missing. But it is possible to hunt down small snippets of information, to trawl through history for the signs.
Before The Hotel there is a farm on the land. A small building that cannot have had more than a few chickens, perhaps some pigs. The death records from the area show that no one lives for long at the property, that there is a plague of unfortunate accidents and stillbirths. The farm is passed down through a family whose misfortunes must have felt weighty. Before the fire which destroys the farm and the sale of the land which leads to the building of The Hotel, a woman lives on the property – the wife of a descendant – and dies there also. The woman seems to be notorious in the surrounding area as someone who has some talent in prediction and who the neighbours are suspicious of. At this time a spate of child deaths is recorded which can now be attributed to farm run-off into the water supplies, but at the time is blamed on the woman. The woman is childless and her family are not originally from the country, and this makes her a suspect and leads to her being drowned in the pond out the back of the farm. Before drowning she scratches some words into the front door of the house. The words read: I WILL SEE YOU SOON .
The Hotel exhibits what might be described as personality traits. It seems to know the people who come and go within its walls. Perhaps more insidiously The Hotel seems to collect people to it, has a magnetism that is sometimes
impossible to ignore. The curse that follows The Hotel might be blamed entirely on the unnamed woman who was killed there, but it seems more likely that any unfortune comes in fact from the earth itself and she was only the first person to note it.
The Hotel build is rife with issue and for a long time it looks like it may remain unfinished. The ground is sodden and swallows the foundations; there are accidents when scaffolding fails. Trees that are dug up on one day reassert themselves over the weekend. Still. It is done, the building is finished in 1919. The style is Gothic Revival; long chimneys, narrow windows covered with hood mouldings, stained glass which dims the light, an orchard. This is where everything begins.
In the 1950s a poet better known for her meandering nature poems writes a few lines about The Hotel, embedded in a longer, strange piece about a lost love and a failed suicide attempt. In the poem The Hotel is transitory, almost mythic, a dangerous place which reappears throughout history in different guises. A year later the poet succeeds where before she failed and is drowned in the sea off the North Norfolk coast. In the boarding house where she was staying is a notebook with scraps of writing, some scrawled images in pen the most distinctive of which seem to be of The Hotel, recognisable by its severe chimneys. Beneath the drawings the poet has written: I WILL BE THERE SOON.
Hotel *