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But you can never leave
Jun. 19th, 2025 11:09 amThe ideal atmospheric reading choice here would have been to save this for a trip to New York, but as I don’t have one planned, I went ahead and read Cat Scully’s debut novel, Below the Grand Hotel, this past week–mostly in Salem, which I guess is acceptable because all horror novels are thematically appropriate for Salem. But this is a very New York sort of novel anyway, because it’s about the art scene and fancy hotels in New York in the 1920s, and nowhere is ever as 1920s as New York.
The comp titles for this book were The Great Gatsby and Hellraiser, which aren’t wrong, per se, but for me the other work it reminded me of the most was probably Libba Bray’s Diviners series. This is praise; I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviners series even though I was losing interest in YA by the time the last book came out.
Our protagonist in Below the Grand Hotel is Mabel Rose Dixon, a young woman from Georgia who, as so many artists have before and since, came to New York to seek her fortune in the performing arts. Mabel has recently been rejected as a Ziegfield Follies girl, not due to lack of talent but due to lack of the things Mr. Ziegfield really wants in his Follies, which is an extremely specific physical look and compliance with his sexually exploitative management style. Mabel is therefore–well, not forced, but certainly incentivized–to put her stage magician skills to unorthodox use as a pickpocket in order to fund her ability to keep body and soul together while she works to break into the industry. Unfortunately, Mabel goes after the wrong bit of jewelry, and body and soul thus become forcibly separated in a nasty deal with some demons within the Grand Hotel, a labyrinthine pocket universe that draws in desperate people and never lets them back out.
The book is part video-game-like mystery as Mabel navigates both the physical hotel and the web of secrets and lies that she is now entangled in, trying to figure out a way to not only escape the hotel herself but to free a shifting arrangement of other people’s souls as well. It’s also part meditation on the challenges and paradoxes of trying to be an artist and make art in an industry where not only is the art a commodity, but celebrity culture means that the artists become commodities themselves as well–and those commodities are subject to the rapid pace of both the whims of fashion and technological change. Scully really digs into what would make selling your soul to demons to perform in a murder hotel you can never leave appealing, which is, essentially, the alternative it provides to trying to scrape together a living in the supposedly non-demonic art world. Also there’s a lot of gore; every time Mabel gets to take a bath and change her clothes it’s like two pages before she’s covered head to toe in viscera again. It was a lot of fun.
The comp titles for this book were The Great Gatsby and Hellraiser, which aren’t wrong, per se, but for me the other work it reminded me of the most was probably Libba Bray’s Diviners series. This is praise; I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviners series even though I was losing interest in YA by the time the last book came out.
Our protagonist in Below the Grand Hotel is Mabel Rose Dixon, a young woman from Georgia who, as so many artists have before and since, came to New York to seek her fortune in the performing arts. Mabel has recently been rejected as a Ziegfield Follies girl, not due to lack of talent but due to lack of the things Mr. Ziegfield really wants in his Follies, which is an extremely specific physical look and compliance with his sexually exploitative management style. Mabel is therefore–well, not forced, but certainly incentivized–to put her stage magician skills to unorthodox use as a pickpocket in order to fund her ability to keep body and soul together while she works to break into the industry. Unfortunately, Mabel goes after the wrong bit of jewelry, and body and soul thus become forcibly separated in a nasty deal with some demons within the Grand Hotel, a labyrinthine pocket universe that draws in desperate people and never lets them back out.
The book is part video-game-like mystery as Mabel navigates both the physical hotel and the web of secrets and lies that she is now entangled in, trying to figure out a way to not only escape the hotel herself but to free a shifting arrangement of other people’s souls as well. It’s also part meditation on the challenges and paradoxes of trying to be an artist and make art in an industry where not only is the art a commodity, but celebrity culture means that the artists become commodities themselves as well–and those commodities are subject to the rapid pace of both the whims of fashion and technological change. Scully really digs into what would make selling your soul to demons to perform in a murder hotel you can never leave appealing, which is, essentially, the alternative it provides to trying to scrape together a living in the supposedly non-demonic art world. Also there’s a lot of gore; every time Mabel gets to take a bath and change her clothes it’s like two pages before she’s covered head to toe in viscera again. It was a lot of fun.