The Invisible Hotel is a book that I personally find difficult to characterise by a definitive genre, uncanny and an observation of generational trauma The Invisible Hotel follows Yewon, a convenience store worker, who has taken a year out from university after her father's sudden unexpected death in a distant country and moved back in with her mother in a small village where she was born and raised. Dreaming of escaping from the village or more so the unusual ancestral rites done locally where the bones of their ancestors are washed over and over again in the family bathtubs, where several generations of women have given birth amongst the bones in the bathtub (the ties of ancestry), Yewon takes on a side job of driving an elderly lady who turns out to be a refugee from the North trying to reconnect with her family (her brother). The overarching narrative is a complex reflection on trauma, loss and the tensions the Korean War that has become a cold steadfast stalemate has affected and traumatised entire generations (with Yewon suffering from a strange recurring nightmare about a hotel in the midst of war) leading to complicated collective and personal histories in regards to Korean heritage. A thought-provoking read.

The beginning of this didn’t grip me enough to want to continue with it. I can appreciate a slow reveal but having no hint towards something bigger made it hard.

the premise, cover, and title for this novel intrigued me enough, but once i started reading...something about it just didn't work for me. i understand wanting to maintain a level of ambiguity, but here it was done in such an obvious way as to be counterproductive.

'We were born inside the hotel. All of us were born here and given a key to our rooms.'

Upon starting Yeji Y. Ham's The Invisible Hotel, I wasn't quite sure why I'd decided to pick it up: while I love speculative fiction, I tend to struggle with 'magical realism', or in other words, with unexplained happenings that aren't rooted in the world of the text itself. And The Invisible Hotel is definitely more magical realist than speculative. Set in contemporary South Korea, its narrator, Yewon, feels trapped in the tiny village of Dalbit, where she was born, and where her mother still washes the bones of her ancestors in the bathtub. Yewon is weary of the smell of the rotting bones, and terrified of the expectation that when she has children of her own, she too will give birth in the bathtub. But even as she plots her escape, she starts to dream of a hotel that also manifests the horrors of war, and of her brother, who is stationed near the North Korean border. I never usually get it when other reviewers praise a text for 'vibes', or say they never quite understood what was happening but enjoyed being immersed in a particular kind of feeling. The Invisible Hotel, however, resonated in that way for me, with its imagery of locked hotel rooms, a clothesline full of windows, and an elderly man who is building a house of doors. It made me reach for folktale references like Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs, but it also felt like a more successful version of Elisa Shua Dusapin's Winter in Sokcho, another novel about a young South Korean woman tethered to her hometown that trades in vibes but which never hit emotional heights for me. The Invisible Hotel is, as other reviewers have pointed out, too long, but I don't think it's seriously so: much of the power and horror of this novel comes from the way that the same things keep coming back.

I love reading about South Korea and learning about contemporary life there. In the invisible hotel, we journey with Yewon, a young woman, and her family as they strive to manage their existence amid the fluctuating tensions and dangers of war between North and South Korea.

A complex examination of trauma and loss centred on the Korean War that never technically ended. Yewon has abruptly left university, reeling from her father’s sudden death in a faraway country. By day she works in a convenience store but each night she returns to her mother’s house and the backwater community where she was raised. Here families practice an unusual form of ancestral rite, their bathtubs house the bones of their ancestors. The bones are washed over and over and over again: days, months, years have passed but the bones are never fully cleansed, their stench remains all-pervasive. Successive generations of women have given birth among these bones, the continuity of family, of biological connections stretching down through the ages made visible. Yewon dreams of escape but she’s overwhelmed by bizarre, recurring dreams filled with images of a hotel caught up in the throes of some cataclysmic event. For Yewon the past refuses to remain past, profusely bleeding into her present. This and a tentative connection with an aging North Korean, one of the ‘war refugees’ (pinanmin) searching for lost family, force Yewon to confront her heritage, the complicated tangle of personal and collective histories.

Korean Canadian writer Yeji Y. Ham’s debut novel conjures a South Korea riddled with half-buried anxieties, where the threat posed by North Korea is both omnipresent and part of a process of everyday forgetting - and escalating threats manifest as insta posts where K-pop idols promote nuclear survival kits as the perfect holiday gift. Ham’s narrative is ambitious and relevant, and there are a number of arresting scenes and observations, but it didn’t quite come together for me. Part of this lies in the juxtaposition of the mundane and the more horrific. The realist elements composed of Yewon’s everyday experiences, her relationships with friends and family felt awkwardly spliced with the more abstract metaphors and visions of death and inward decay. Ham’s imagery could also be striking but its force was often diminished by repetition and by the sheer length of Ham’s novel.

When does a war begin? When does it end? If a war was to start in your country tomorrow, and end in three years, would things go back to normal straight away? Would that be it? Sure, things would get better on a larger scale, optimism would get the wider community back on their feet. But on an individual level, you, your friends, your family, would be left with both physical and mental scarring that never truly goes away. The Invisible Hotel, with its magnifying glass hovering over the Korean War of the early 1950s, attempts to describe and show this feeling of war’s largely forgotten rippling effect.

In this book we follow a young woman, Yewon, as she and her family attempt to navigate their lives alongside the ripples and threats of war that ebb and flow between North and South Korea. Kim Jong Un has just become the supreme leader in the North, and the futures of Yewon and her family are teetering on the fence of this new ruler’s whims and wants. Yewon’s brother is enlisted in the South Korean army. He is currently stationed on the border that separates the two countries. Her sister is attempting to start a family, her goals not really having a set direction, and the sister’s estrangement from their mother begins to strain on Yewon’s individuality. The mother, however, is the inner core around which the rest of the family are built. She felt the effects of the Korean War first hand. Yewon’s grandparents passed first-hand accounts of war onto the mother, creating a trauma that can never be completely stopped. This trickle-down effect is even more true, even more real, when things were never truly settled, as is the case with North and South Korea. Random uprisings and threats of further outbreak have scattered the last 70 years for both North and South Korean civilians.

Subtleties of this generational trauma are signalled throughout the book, as Yewon cannot escape the shackles of parenthood that her mother has placed her under. Is it restraint that Yewon’s mother uses or is she just protecting her child? We see Yewon meet a few characters in the book that give off energies that are either standoffish or secretive. Ms Han can be unassuming and hard to grasp. Mrs Lim, Yewon’s neighbour, is curt and snappy. The old man pops up on numerous occasions, in what feel like dreams and apparitions. These dreams extend beyond just the old man however, as Yewon is consumed, asleep and awake, by visions of a hotel. The hotel contains doors and windows. Some locked for now. Others just needing to be walked through. People can be seen floating through the rooms. Bones scattered. Screams echo. This hotel, and the non-familial characters in the book, act as signs of trauma, fear, and anxiety of the unknown. There is a tetchiness that goes hand-in-hand with living in and around a warzone – one that cannot be experienced from just witnessing war from afar.

While the unhighlighted subtleties of war that the book attempts to describe do work, and do on most occasions give a genuine raw kick to the overall reading experience, the tools being used – the dreamed hotel, the older village members – can often times feel too manufactured within the story. There is a genuineness to the story that cannot be denied or questioned, but certain elements of the narrative feel too naked, too on-show. There are parts of the book where one can see the author attempting to move the pieces of the puzzle in a heartfelt attempt to highlight a certain message or thing. This obviousness does take away from the overall reading experience. There is potential for it to take the reader out of the story and dampen the impact of those raw moments that the book contains. Seeing the blueprints of something can take away the magic of the design.

This book is categorised as a horror. On its own I do not value or enjoy putting art into a tightly packed box, but here it feels especially off the mark. Yes, there is horror to the book. It is a book that navigates around war. There is bound to be horror with these pages. But labelling it in the genre of horror takes away from what is completely real throughout. Now more so than ever.

The Invisible Hotel is quiet without ever been disinteresting or forgettable. It is a book that says a lot in exactly what it doesn’t say. Literary manoeuvres can be too frontal at times, but I feel that Yeji Y. Ham finds a way to pull the majority of what this book aims for together in the end.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Zando Press for a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

The story is told from the perspective of a young woman in South Korea, struggling to reconcile her own personal lack of purpose, the various tensions in her family, and the macro political tensions with North Korea. The book explores the interconnectedness between the national trauma of South Koreans and their personal trauma, and how these things feed each other, making it very difficult to plan, hope, or aspire for a better future. There is a sense of impermanence permeating the entire story, even if it ends on a more positive note than the majority of the narrative.

I really liked what I read. What struck me most was the way the author wove the macro and the micro together, creating a very tangible, so real you could touch it, reality that emanated from the protagonist's experiences. There was something so powerful in this juxtaposition that it almost felt like a spiral the reader could easily fall into - hopelessness and despair. I also loved the pacing of the story, and how the real intermingled with the imaginary (or dreamt), to create the subjective reality experienced by the protagonist.

It was also a deeply illuminating book. I loved learning more about the contemporary experience of South Koreans and how much of it was shaped by the imparnence of the sense of safety they were living in. It is just something that never crossed my mind, but when it did, illustrated by the author's skill, it opened a new way of thinkkng about South Korea, and, more importantly, about conflict, especially the silent kind.

It's hard for me to call out a major theme I disliked about the book. It was not always easy to read, but, frankly, it comes with the territory. The main drawback, perhaps, was my struggle to fully understand the hotel analogy. It kept coming back throughout the story, and it felt important. That being said, I never connected with it, and struggled to see what it was really for.

I recommend to anyone interested in contemporary South Korea, the history of conflict, and the story of families subject to it.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this novel in return for an honest review.

I wish I could give this between 3 and 4 stars because the first and second half get completely different ratings.

So... this is definitely not a horror as advertised.

It's for an audience who likes a slow burn and won't put down a book right away just because not much is happening. The writing is beautiful, but even that couldn't keep me from feeling a bit frustrated with the slowness of the first 60%--which was mostly about her driving a woman to a prison. I was so confused about what the deeper meaning was for half the book and how the "invisible hotel" was going to tie in.

But the last 20-30% of it was great. I love learning about Asian culture because my American education lacked so much of it. The hotel is a metaphor for the Korean war and the circumstances these characters were born into. The story has some epically beautiful language when it delves into the magical realism parts. It really made me feel something when the hotel was compared to their circumstances. Unfortunately, the first half is so dull and just talks about driving and taking care of neighbours. I just feel that a lot of it was repetitive/unnecessary and was possibly added so that this could be considered a novel.

“How far or how distant, even while thousands of kilometres away, there is no changing it. No leaving where we are born into. Home. I want to go home.” As an expat, I can definitely relate.

It took me about 70% of the way through this novel to fully understand it and what its intention was. I was going to give it a lower rating but once I got to that point I don’t think I can give it any lower than a 3 star.

I went into the Invisible Hotel thinking it was going to be a literary horror as is described on the blurb. But this book is something entirely different. This book is about war trauma, and stands along the likes of The Things We Carried and Slaughterhouse 5. I can’t help but think with the popularity of literary horror, its ‘gothicness’ is being marketed as its selling point. But the slight gothic aspects of this book, and where the books truly shines, is in its discussion of the brutality of the Korean War and generational trauma which was done so well in the last third of the book.

The Invisible Hotel is about a woman who dreams and has visions of a strange hotel with loads of locked rooms. Her brother is in the army and her mother spends her time cleaning the bones of those deceased in the town which she keeps piled up in her bathtub. It is the hotel which is the symbol of trauma in this book - rather than being the novel’s ‘horror’ in the conventional sense of the genre, the hotel is the epitome of the narrator’s unpacked trauma where each room of the hotel belongs to a victim of the brutal Korean War. The real ‘horror’ of the book is in this unpacking, where the narrator realises why she is constantly plagued by these images, what they represent and why it has caused the mental breakdown of most of the women in her family.

I loved the final moments in the novel where these threads came together, as it did take a really long time for this book to get going thematically. The image of all of the children in her family being born in the bathtub, literally on top of the bones of the dead which their mother keeps, was such a poignant metaphor for the inherited trauma that has been passed down by the generations of Korean families who never recovered from the terrors and pain of the Korean War.

I could go on and on citing trauma theory in relation to this book but I think the most important takeaway is that this book is not a horror. It is a war book that looks at trauma and is therefore preoccupied with terror, rather than horror, an important distinction in trauma theory. It doesn’t take a step into the horror genre at all but rather sits comfortably in the cannon of war trauma novels that have come before it and that I don’t think we’ve seen for years, where it shields the true brutality through its imagery and linguistic techniques.

After finishing it I’d definitely like to reread this book to see if it makes a bit more sense on a second go, but I wish I’d known a bit more about what it was doing before I started reading it as then I could have fully appreciated its story telling without spending ages trying to figure out what was going on and trying to search for the ‘gothic horror’ I was told was going to be in here. This is on reflection a really important and sad book which I think I has taught me a lot about Korean history I didn’t expect. I’d really recommend it for anyone who doesn’t mind a challenge but also wants to dip their toes into trauma literature.

Yeji Y. Ham’s speculative horror is based on the life of a women as she adjusts to the shifting identity long after the Korean war. Yewon keeps seeing a hotel in her dreams. One with infinite keys and rooms where she is desperate to escape. In reality she still live with her mother and works at a convenience store. Her mother obsessively washes the bones of her ancestors in their bathtub, a tradition everyone does so not to forget those who were lost to war. Now her sister has recently experienced a tragedy, her brother is stationed near the North Korean border and her mother’s health is declining fast. Yewon’s dreams of this hotel are leading her towards an uncomfortable truth.

Told through Yewon’s experiences, the story was quite harrowing to read. There are many themes and perspectives of struggle explored which left Yewon confused as to what they meant. Through her dreams of this hotel, she realises the bigger picture and her role within her family.

At times this became quite emotional to read. the descriptions of war, the metaphors behind the day to day tasks her mother was carrying out, her explanations of why she was seeing so many despairing events occur, it felt like a build up to some things people can relate to gong through similar circumstances.

I would say this book is in the same vein as reading the works of Han Kong and Yoko Ogawa. It will leave you thinking about it long after you have finished it.

An interesting take on the the anxieties surrounding an impending war, coupled with dealing with generational trauma. Yewon dreams of a strange hotel she struggles to navigate, and cannot seem to find her footing in every day life in a country on the brink of war, especially while grieving her father. Overall this was a beautifully written book, but it perhaps dragged on a little too long. I felt it only really got going in the last 100 pages and could have done with a bit more plot at the beginning. Yeji Y. Ham's writing style is gorgeous, so I'll definitely read more of her work in the future.

All about generational trauma, traditions and Korean identity, the invisible hotel is about a young woman trying to deal with grief as she tries to find her place in the world. It feels like an almost impossible task as despair clings to her and nightmares plague her steps. It has some interesting concepts but is missing something for me. The metaphors are a little stretched out by the end.