Laura van den Berg’s The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is a marvel. The haunting story of a woman who goes to a horror film festival in Havana and sees (or does she?) her dead husband is one of the most stunning novels of 2018. The Third Hotel nods to its extensive cultural influences-- from feminist film fiction to Clarice Lispector—and then eats them all alive, absorbing and metabolizing these sources to create an entirely new world, strange and beautiful but entirely solid in its own universe. Above all it dives deep into “genre” (is it Literary Fiction? Mystery? Horror?) and turns it inside out, challenging all of our simplistic ideas of categorization. There are moments of narrative freefall, but your vertigo is always intentional: van den Berg is an artist in utter, full-cylinder control of her craft. You’ll finish this gorgeous novel breathless, exhilarated, and forced into an uneasy reckoning with your secret selves.
