The Haunted Hotel

The Haunted Hotel | Wilkie Collins

It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.

Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.

It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.

Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.

All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.