The Hotel - Book Tour and Giveaway

From Daylight to Madness
The Hotel Book 1
by Jennifer Anne Gordon
Genre: Psychological Suspense, Gothic Horror 

The latest book from the critically acclaimed author of Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent; Jennifer Anne Gordon.
On an almost uninhabitable rocky island off the coast of Maine, a Hotel looms over the shore, an ever-present gray lady that stands strong like a guard, keeping watch. For many who come here, this island is a sanctuary and a betrayal.
This is a place where memories linger like ghosts, and the ephemeral nature of time begins to peel away …like the sanity of all who have been unlucky enough to step foot on its shore.
In the late spring of 1873, Isabelle gave birth to her son Oscar, he cried for three startling minutes, and then went silent. During the months that follow, Isabelle is drugged and lulled into an almost hallucinatory world of grief and fear. Her life begins to feel as though it exists in a terrifying new reality separated from those around her …
When her grieving begins to make her husband, Henry, uncomfortable, he and his mother conspire to send Isabelle away to a Summer Hotel on Dagger Island, where she can rest and heal. While they are adamant that the hotel is not an asylum and that Isabelle will be able to return eventually to her home, Isabelle understands in her heart that it is all a lie. That perhaps, everything about being a woman in this time, may have always been a lie.
Her family has lied to her, and she has lied to herself.
The Hotel, of course, is not what it seems, and the foreboding Dagger Island begins to feel more like a prison than a retreat. Isabelle hears relentless sounds coming from the attic above her room, and the ever-present cries of small children scream in her head almost constantly. Are they hallucinations, or are they connected to the small cemetery she found, filled with the fresh dirt of little graves, the brokenhearted reminders of people that no one believes ever existed?
She meets a fellow guest at the Hotel, a young, enigmatic, and deeply damaged priest, named Francis.
Together they teeter on the edges of reality and try desperately to become free from the fates that their pasts have bound them to.
From Daylight to Madness is a poetic, and haunting Gothic Fiction novel that is both profoundly unsettling and darkly romantic.


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​Prologue
April 1873

He cried for about three minutes, his little voice sounded powerful at first, fighting, and strong. His cries found their way to her ears, which had always been so desperate for love. His strange sounds immediately sounded like home, and like love, but those sounds very quickly changed. Of course, it all happened so fast, she did not even know it was a ‘him’ at this point. It was just crying, just screaming.
            Just home.
There was an almost immediate feeling of removal, followed by a rush of emotion, pain, and even more blood. So much so, that the expulsion of this texture felt as though she were still giving birth. She did not even realize her part in all of this was done. She had done ‘what she could’ and the rest was up to God.
He made guttural sounds, uneven, jagged bursts. Gasping sounds that seemed to grow muffled, as if there were a thick viscous liquid poured down his throat. It was a drowning of sorts; the irony was that he was drowning outside of her. He was drowning on this crisp spring night in the slightly dusty and salt-tinged air of Portland Maine.
It was painful to her, those begging breaths that seemed to reach out and grasp. The pain was not real, not in a physical sense, not anymore. But the emotional pain, she was beginning to feel it now. In the seemingly endless minutes that passed, she had already come to know his sounds. Those frenzied sounds, the way they stampeded into her, she knew she would feel this forever. They were carved into her like initials on the old Oak tree in the small yard of the poorhouse where she grew up. She knew that the echo of these cries would last years. Their scars would grow pale over time but would always be there, marking her memory; these little auditory footprints that would feel like kicks insides of her.
The part of her that made him, that held him inside her body, was scarred now. Ruined.
There was pain for months before this. It went unsaid. It was ‘to be expected.’ At her age, there should have always been ‘some discomfort.’ She mentioned it, or at least she thought she must have when she would visit her physician. His office was an uncomfortable and dusty room located in the back of the Apothecary.
            During her visits, she would describe what she was feeling inside of her. She said it was like butterflies at first, the kicking, the movement . . . but over time it dwindled. The butterflies became moths, and eventually they were just dust in a jar, on a shelf, inside of her body.
She is not quite as sure now, she is trying to remember, and maybe she never mentioned it at all, or at least not enough. She should have made it clearer, made her voice heard; the feeling that something inside her took a wrong turn, that it somehow went wrong. She should have said that the excited feeling she had deep below her belly, was still there, but it felt slower; did she say that? And if she said it, did they hear her; was she heard?
            Did they care? Worse, did she care?
She thought she would not be able to take the sound anymore, the plaintive and desperate cries from this small creature that lived inside her, it was too much. Could none of them do anything to make it stop? She tried to push herself out of the bed. She tried in vain to reach for something that was not there, that was never there.
            Love.
She imagined the hands, the small fingers almost like cats’ claws. She wanted to feel the sharp nasty cuts from this kitten of hers. This little thing filled with so much fear, anger, and love, that in its excitement it hurt her. It reached out and scratched. It bit.
            She bled.
But as she sat up, the room swam around her and the darkness crept in front the corners. It almost overtook her, which was when she noticed it; the sudden silence. She let herself fall back onto the bed as the early morning light turned from daylight to madness, and then of course, there was nothing, there was nothing at all.
            Her hair which had been soaked with sweat, now hung cool and damp against her face. The blood soaking the sheets, which were warm only moments ago, began to thicken in the cool air and feel stiff against her skin.
Isabelle thought it would all be different, she imagined throughout these not quite nine months that the room would be warm, that someone would have thought to light candles. She always pictured a healing fire in the fireplace in the corner of the largest room, in their small house. She could imagine Henry’s face, it would be warm, appreciative, it would seem almost, if not quite exactly, to look like love. This expression of his, it would live in the house next to where love would be, if it had only ever moved in, adjacent to it, holding its hand, living with it. A feeling next to love.
He would hand her the baby and Henry would say, “Here he is, our boy, our Oscar.”
It was not nine months. No, of course, it was not. It was seven, maybe seven and a half – she should know. She should have always known the exactness of it, the moment of conception. The moment that she would be more than just a ‘her,’ the moment she would be a mother, the thing she was always expected to be, and until now, and even now . . . was not.
            She did not know; she did not know any of this. She was a mother, who now was not. What is that called? Is there a name for that; the silent grief, the mourning that is best ignored, tidied away, lest it make someone uncomfortable?
There was blood on the floor, it was mixed with tissue, there were pieces of her, and pieces of Oscar. She thought perhaps his little hands had held onto something inside of her and pulled it out on his way. As if he knew, it was not his time to leave.
            She closed her eyes, and a cry filled the air.
            His cries, Oscar’s cries, not hers; Isabelle had not cried.
            Not yet.
There would be an inexpensive grave that simply read, ‘Baby Boy,’ when it should have said his name; a name that her husband would want to save for ‘the next one.’ As if this one was not real. As if a life existing in three small minutes somehow meant less than a life lived in thirty years.
            This thing that happened, she could almost hear the neighbors whispering about it, their voices thick with judgement and colored on the ends with fear. Whispering about the birth that did not happen, the baby that did not live.
            The life that never happened – except it did.
There was Oscar; he was there, for three minutes. There were no loving looks, no warmth of candles and dim soothing firelight. There was pain. There was blood. There was relief.
            There was three minutes of crying.
            There was Oscar.
            Then, then, there was nothing.

When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk
The Hotel Book 2 

Critically acclaimed Author Jennifer Anne Gordon's conclusion to The Hotel Series, with the sequel to From Daylight to Madness.

In one startling moment in the late summer of 1873 a tragedy fell like summer sun on the gray jagged shores of Dagger Island. Francis loses everything he thought his life was, and what it could have become. His heart breaks and his feet run, all the way back to his childhood home, he reaches for a past that may not exist.
He is there, in the little house in Dorchester Neck. A place haunted with missing time. He feels the comfort from walls that lean in too close, but then …He feels the trauma that ripped his life in two and in a blink of an eye he is back at the hotel. He can feel the memories fade as the cold fingers of winter wrap around him. He does not know how he got there, or indeed if he ever left.
Francis has lived his whole life veiled in the memories that are more alive than his present. The current days fade away before he can hold on to him. Everything he was or thought he could have been is gone. He realizes he may be a monster, and the person he has fallen in love with may not even exist. Francis holds onto the memories he thinks are real …until he is almost consumed by them.
Francis is isolated in a world of mesmerism, with his tormentor and healer Doctor Hughes.
Francis is a guest in this hotel with his past, his present, and who he believes to be his future. Isabelle. His world is a labyrinth … he feels her hand in his. The fingers intertwine and there is nothing left but her …
She is a memory, a ghost, and a hallucination.
He can almost remember the moment when his father’s glass shattered into his face…he can almost remember who he was before he was broken in two.
He can almost remember…
He can almost…
He can…
He…


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JENNIFER ANNE GORDON is a professional ballroom dancer and choreographer by day, and a curly haired neurotic writer by night. She is an actor, a traveler, a photographer, a lover of Gothic Horror, and a dog mom. She lives in the wilds of New Hampshire with her partner on and off the dance floor. Her novels include the Kindle Award for Horror 2020 Winning book, Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent, as well as the historical Gothic novel From Daylight to Madness (The Hotel #1) as well as When The Sleeping Dead Still Talk (The Hotel #2). She also has a published collection of her artwork, titled "Victoriana {mixed media art of jennifer anne gordon}.


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Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?
Hi! I’m Jennifer Anne Gordon, I am a gothic horror writer from New Hampshire. I studied theatre at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and worked for a few years in the professional theatre world here in New England. I have been lucky enough to make my living in the arts for my entire adult life. For the past ten years (until Covid) my “day job had been as a professional ballroom dancer and instructor. I have always wanted to write, since I was a seventh grader being bullied by mean girls. I would not like to eat alone in the cafeteria, and I was lucky to have an English Teacher who let me eat lunch in her classroom. I would sit in that room and write, and it was an amazing escape from the world. I have to say it was the only thing I found that I loved more than reading!
But I think I spent a lot of my adult life convincing myself that I could not write, or I should not write, that I didn’t know how, that I hadn’t studied it or learned the craft of it. Looking back, I think the reality was that I was in a bad relationship for a long time, and any self confidence I had was stripped away from me. It took years of being out of that relationship to finally find the courage to use my voice again. I realized that not writing was harder than writing. So, one day I sat down, and I started writing an idea I had 20 years ago, and that idea became my debut novel Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent. That book (just a few weeks ago won the Kindle Award for Best Horror/Suspense Novel of 2020, and has since been named as a finalist for Best Horror Novel as well as the Book of the Year Award from Authors on the Air.

What is something unique/quirky about you?
I am a lover of abandoned places and buildings. For years my now husband and I would sneak into abandoned buildings and photograph them and then make collaborative mixed media paintings based on the beauty of decay!

Tell us something really interesting that's happened to you!
A ghost held my hand and squeezed it really hard while I was on a tour of underground Prague.

What are some of your pet peeves?
Lateness, complaining, sleeping in silence.

Where were you born/grew up at?
I was born in Manchester NH and raised there. I moved to Ohio for many years, but now I am thankfully back in my home state. I love it here.

If you knew you'd die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?
It would not matter what I was doing as long as I was with my husband and our dog.

Who is your hero and why?
I don’t think I really have a hero. If I have to choose someone it would be my father. He was a Veteran and a POW, and was a very patient and strong man, he faced his illness with a sense of stoic grace.

What kind of world ruler would you be?
A stressed out one. I don’t want to rule.

What are you passionate about these days?
Kindness, and changing our political world for the better.

What do you do to unwind and relax?
Bourbon and Netflix

Describe yourself in 5 words or less!
Anxious, Creative, Empathic, Sensitive, Neurotic.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I always considered myself to be a writer, but I considered myself an author when I was had my first novel published.

Do you have a favorite movie?
Titanic (DON’T JUDGE, lol)

Which of your novels can you imagine made into a movie?
I think Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent would be an amazing film. My Hotel series would need to be a miniseries!

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
Visiting one of the most beautiful and famous bookstores in the world, Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal. Also seeing where Byron lived in Vencice Italy, and a palace where he used to party in Greece.

As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
I don’t know if it accurately fits with my writing, but I will always choose a fox.

What inspired you to write this book?
The Hotel Series, which is a two-book duet which includes From Daylight to Madness (book 1) and When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk (book 2), we originally intended to just be one novel. I was inspired originally by an experience I had while I was doing a past life regression session. I very much saw the first scene in the first book, and then there was another time that I saw the final scene. I really wanted to find out what happened in between these two bookends. So, I decided to fictionalize it. As I wrote From Daylight to Madness, which is the story of Isabelle and Francis, I realized I was not able to give Francis the amount of time the character needed and deserved if he didn’t get his own book.

What can we expect from you in the future?
I have a lot of things planned and am hoping to write. I have started work on a speculative fiction story, which is easiest to describe as “Contagion meets Lost in Translation” or “The Stand except with a meet cute.” It’s been fun to step away from gothic fiction for a little while and tackle something that feels very current.

Do you have any “side stories” about the characters?
YES!! My favorite thing to do is leave Easter Eggs in the books that are possible hints. At some point I will probably do a short story collection with the extra stories.

Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in (Name of book)? The main characters in the Hotel Series as Isabelle, a woman living in the 1870’s. She gives birth to a son, who dies shortly after he is born. The book follows her struggles with the grief process and the way women specifically were treated who had mental illness. The other main character is Francis, he is a Catholic Priest who has lost his faith. Over the course of the two books the mystery of Francis is solved. He is a victim of childhood trauma, and the book When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk is his journey to understand what has happened to him.
There are also some fun/creepy side characters including Hawthorne Hughes who is the gentleman who runs the “Summer Hotel” (which is really an asylum). There is also a young very unstable teenage girl named Agnes. I don’t want to say too much about her, other than people always clamor for mor of her. I did get a chance to expand her character more in the second book of the series, which was fun and heartbreaking.


Where did you come up with the names in the story?
Isabelle and Francis I just knew in my heart that would be their names. The other names came from searching through the Census reports from around that time and doing research on popular names for the time period, the location, and the characters ethnicity.

What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Every time my characters surprised me by doing something I did not expect.

How did you come up with the title of your first novel?
A lot of my book Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent is written in a very poetic way, and the title came from one of the lines in the book that was in describing the ghost.

Who designed your book covers?
The covers for the Hotel Series were designed by the incredibly talented Don Noble of Rooster Republic Press. I could not be happier with them! The cover of my first novel, Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent is a photo that my husband took of me. I just cropped my head off and photoshopped my tattoos away.

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book?
No, no I don’t think I would. Nothing major at least.

Did you learn anything during the writing of your recent book?
I learned about the emotional exhaustion that comes from writing really heavy material. I also think I learned a lot about character development over the two books and even learned a little about creating a nontraditional love story.

If your book was made into a film, who would you like to play the lead?
For the hotel series I would love Joaquin Phoenix and Eva Green to be Francis and Isabelle.

How did you come up with name of this book?
From Daylight to Madness came to me again in a poem I had written years ago and it fit very thematically to the book, so I made sure to work it into a line in the book. The title for When the Sleeping Dead Still talk just came organically, I typed those words in one of the chapters and I knew right away that was the title.

What is your favorite part of this book and why?
I can’t say which part is my favorite in When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk, because it’s a huge spoiler. From Daylight to Madness, my favorite part is the picnic scene, and the scene when Isabelle goes into the attic….because every gothic romance needs a creepy attic scene.

If you could spend time with a character from your book whom would it be? And what would you do during that day? I would choose Isabelle, and much like Francis, I would take her on a picnic.

Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
A combination of imagination and pieces of myself.

Do your characters seem to hijack the story or do you feel like you have the reigns of the story?
Oh they definitely hijack the story, I have ceased thinking I control them, and frankly I like it the most when they take over and surprise me.

Have you written any other books that are not published?
Only my current work in progress. I do have a couple short stories that are not published as well as a ton of poetry.

If your book had a candle, what scent would it be?
Petrichor, which is the smell of rain on dry soil. It would be that with undertones of saltwater.

What did you edit out of this book?
A ridiculously long multiple page metaphor about spiders in a well….it was really just word vomit.

Is there a writer which brain you would love to pick for advice? Who would that be and why?
I am lucky, I host a podcast called Vox Vomitus, and on the show, we chat with today’s best authors about their writing, what went right, and what went wrong along the way. So, I have been lucky enough to already pick the brains of many of my favorite authors already including Paul Tremblay, Carol Goodman, Wendy Webb, Diane Zinna, Matt Ruff, and VC Andrews aka Andrew Niederman, just to name a few. The advice I always want is how to persevere through the hard parts of writing, the rejection, the loneliness, the bad idea…


Fun Facts/Behind the Scenes/Did You Know?'-type tidbits about the author, the book or the writing process of the book.
Every time I get frustrated, I have a “popcorn party” which is when I need to stress eat a bowl of popcorn until the muse returns to me.

What are your top 10 favorite books/authors?
Oh this is tricky…Let’s go with books!
1- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
2- My Sweet Audrina VC Andrews.
3- The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.
4- The All Night Sun by Diane Zinna.
5 -The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman.
6 – Salem’s Lot by Stephen King.
7- Ghost Story by Peter Straub.
8- Anne of Green Gables by L.M Montgomery.
9- Complete Works of Anne Sexton.
10- We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson. (yes, she got two mentions).

What book do you think everyone should read?
The Complete Works of William Shakepeare.

How long have you been writing?
Since I was 12

Do the characters all come to you at the same time or do some of them come to you as you write?
I know my main characters, but the secondary characters just seem to magically appear out of the ether. That being said, even my main characters only really become real, and fleshed out as I am writing them.

What kind of research do you do before you begin writing a book?
For the Hotel Series I did a fair amount of historical research, as well as what life was like on New England islands during the 1800’s.

Do you see writing as a career?
I do. Currently I am trying to make this my career, but I understand that most writers have “day jobs” as well as writing. Hopefully someday it will pay the rent.

Do you read yourself and if so what is your favorite genre?
Yes, I’m a very avid reader. My favorite genre is horror.

Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise? Why?
Silence or white noise. I like it quiet as there are a lot of times that I read or write out loud, also on the rare occasion I do have music, it needs to be the “soundtrack to the book” so it’s usually just a few songs.

Do you write one book at a time or do you have several going at a time?
Just one at a time. Sometimes I think about other books or future projects, but I need to focus on just one piece at a time. I let myself get completely emotionally invested in the characters.

If you could have been the author of any book ever written, which book would you choose?
Haunting of Hill House.

Pen or typewriter or computer?
If I am writing fiction or essays it’s a computer, if it’s poetry it’s a pen.

Tell us about a favorite character from a book?
Rob from Tana French’s In the Woods. He was so incredibly broken, this was one of the few characters that really ripped my heart out, when I was finished with that novel he just stuck with me, and I couldn’t and didn’t want to read anything for a while after that. I felt like I was in mourning. For people not familiar with Tana French’s incredible Dublin Murder Series. In the Woods is the first novel of that series, and it follows Dublin police officer’s in the homicide unit. When Rob was a child, two of his best friends went missing while he was playing with them, he was found a couple days later with no shoes and no memory of what happened. THAT ALONE makes him an incredible character that you want to root for even when he is doing something that is despicable.

A day in the life of the author?
You wake up tired, always. In my case I wake up and then I spend an hour or two taking care of my elderly mom, then I work out, this is when I read or I watch something dumb and turn my brain off. I like to write in the afternoons and into the evening. I am NOT a late at night writer though my imagination does go into overdrive at night, but that is usually just setting up what I am going to write over the next few days. Finally, you fall asleep, and half dream of your characters, the next morning you wake up tired, and do it all again. It’s a job that you can “do” the same thing every day, but they are never the same day.

Describe your writing style.
Lyrical, poetic, evocative, and visceral.

What makes a good story?
I think the characters drive the story, if I love the characters, I will love the book, the plot is secondary to me.

What are you currently reading?
I just finished an ARC of the new standalone VC Andrews novel Whispering Hearts

Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?
I try to just be me, and I write a book I would want to read. I have a unique writing style, so even if I am writing a “common gothic trope” I think it feels very different to the reader.

What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
I actually prefer writing male characters, I am not sure why, but I have not had any problems writing from the male perspective. I try to write with universal enough themes that the emotions are the same no matter the sex.

How long on average does it take you to write a book?
Probably around 6 months, but as I am a total “pantser” and I don’t outline or really plan, this can vary a lot.


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