The Kirkus Review: The Hitchcock Hotel
Six former friends reunite for a killer weekend in their old college town.
Alfred Smettle has waited 16 years to get revenge on the friends who betrayed him. Acquiring the Hitchcock Hotel, named after Alfred's favorite filmmaker and namesake, was only the first step. Getting the five others to gather there for the weekend was the second. And for the third, well, let the games begin.
Zoe, Grace, Samira, Julius, and TJ all have their reasons for showing up at Alfred's behest: guilt, for most of them. Also, their professional and private lives are in shambles, and a weekend away with old friends offers a welcome escape from reality. Little do they know, their host plans to kill one of them and plant evidence implicating another, righting a nearly 20-year-old wrong and sending the hotel's profile skyrocketing. With his encyclopedic Hitchcock knowledge and his faithful assistant, Danny, Alfred might just get away with murder…unless something goes horribly wrong in the second act.
Wrobel deftly juggles seven point-of-view characters, finding and harnessing their unique voices with practiced ease. The writing is crisp and clean, if occasionally info-dumpy, and the details of the group's betrayal unspool organically throughout. Mystery and thriller readers will have no complaints for much of their time here - right up until the twist ending they already saw coming.
A predictable twist would be forgivable, given the rest of the positives here, if only we could believe that the character in question would actually get away with it. Unfortunately, we cannot. Their proverbial goose is cooked, and the novel's attempt to hand-wave an explanation exonerating them in the eyes of law enforcement falls flat under even a modicum of critical thinking.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephanie-wrobel/the-hitchcock-hotel/
The Book Reporter spends the Night In
The Hitchcock Hotel opens with quotes from three Alfred Hitchcock films --- Strangers on a Train, Rope and Psycho --- which were based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, the Leopold and Loeb murder case, and serial killer Ed Gein.
In much the same way, Stephanie Wrobel has used nearly everything involving Hitchcock and his movies to inspire her brilliant and endlessly surprising new novel. Fans of the iconic director will delight at the Easter eggs to be found within these pages and how she uses them to move through this intricate plot. The Hitchcock Hotel is sneaky good. And I mean that in the best way possible. Just when you think you know what is happening, Wrobel rocks your world with a plot twist that makes you rethink exactly what is going on.
Alfred Smettle is not your typical Hitchcock fan. He purchased a Victorian house in the White Mountains near where he went to college as a film major. His tireless effort turned it into the aptly named Hitchcock Hotel, which contains rare and authentic memorabilia in a themed hotel packed with tributes to the Master of Suspense.
Alfred is celebrating the hotel’s anniversary with a private weekend where the only guests will be a few fellow film students with whom he was closest at college years ago. He also has an ulterior motive, as early on we witness a discussion between him and his trusted employee/housekeeper, Danny, about the revenge he has planned for this group that did him seriously wrong at the end of their college days together.
Surprisingly, everyone who was invited shows up, although some had trepidation about seeing Alfred again. There is Zoe, a former alcoholic and now restaurant owner; Samira, who owns a successful sex toy company; TJ, a professional bodyguard; Grace, a financial executive; and Julius, who is still an eccentric. At first they are slightly amazed by how nice of a job Alfred did with the place and marvel at the pieces of memorabilia such as a merry-go-round horse from Strangers on a Train and the black phone from Dial M for Murder. The house resembles the Bates Motel from Psycho, and on the ground floor is a small screening room and aviary filled with over 30 crows in tribute to The Birds.
The group mostly has lost touch with each other, but there is the lingering awkward feeling combined with guilt over how things went down with Alfred. They are all very suspicious of him, even though he is exhibiting perfectly friendly behavior. Over dinner, he tells them the story of how the former owner’s wife killed him by feeding him grass and was then taken away. The subsequent discussion leads to the question of how you would commit the perfect murder. With the crew nicely freaked out, Alfred lets his guests retire to their rooms...
Not only are the guests being spied on through the ceiling vents, but also cruel little tricks are being played - like a clump of grass being left on Zoe’s pillow and a man hiding in Samira’s room. On the second night, the guests are forced to watch a screening of Rope, which follows up on the theme of the perfect murder. Alfred begins the film by collecting everyone’s cell phones. Once the movie is over, the phones are no longer in the concierge’s office. The concierge has gone home for the night and is unreachable. They reluctantly stay until morning when they find one of them did not make it through the night alive. Also, someone has slashed the tires of all the vehicles in the parking lot.
The remainder of the novel sees the paranoia and guilt of the surviving guests bubble to a boil while we also find out the secrets that everyone has been hiding about the tragic events from college. It is simply breathtaking to watch it all unfold.
Hitchcock was one of the most brilliant directors of our time, and I feel that Stephanie Wrobel is a kindred spirit in appreciating his great work, which is evident throughout the novel. You don’t need to have seen every Hitchcock movie to enjoy The Hitchcock Hotel, but those familiar with his most popular films will delight in how she blends so many delicious tidbits into her story, making for an immensely entertaining read.
Biff-Bam-Pop: Stephanie Wrobel Discusses Her Inspiration for The Hitchcock Hotel
Just in time for October’s 31 Days of Horror 2024, B-B-P’s Andy Burns had the chance to ask Stephanie a few questions over email about The Hitchcock Hotel, her love of the director and his films, and more.
Stephanie, congrats on The Hitchcock Hotel. It’s a great book, and I read it extremely quickly. Could you talk about how you came up with it?
Thank you so much! The idea came to me while thinking about the Agatha Christie trend in my genre. Lately a number of my fellow suspense writers have built on Christie’s work with their own books. I brainstormed other past giants of the genre and felt Hitchcock deserved the Christie treatment. Obviously, his work has been studied, admired, and imitated for decades, but I wanted to pay a more explicit homage. The Hitchcock Hotel gave me the opportunity to watch even more of Hitch’s movies than I already had—all in the name of research. The day-to-day of a writer’s job is typically unglamorous, but sometimes it’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
How were you first exposed to the work of Alfred Hitchcock?
I took a film studies class in college with a professor named Dr. Scott (sound familiar?). There, I was introduced to Hitchcock’s work when we watched North by Northwest in class. I’ve been fascinated by the director—and his impact on my genre—ever since.
Like all great mysteries, The Hitchcock Hotel has many twists and turns. I’m curious about your process and how you went about mapping those twists as you wrote—were they all in your head? Did you have any sort of notepad or board that you’d throw your ideas on?
I use a site called Padlet to keep track of potential book or screenplay ideas. It’s essentially a digital corkboard. Most of the pins are only a couple words or one sentence—half-baked topics of interest worth further exploration. I prune these pins every six months or so, deleting anything that no longer intrigues me.
For individual projects, i.e. novels, I use paper and digital journals (Moleskines and/or Word docs) to sketch out the general contours first. Once the idea begins to take shape, I work in Scrivener. I like their digital corkboard as well. The goal is one notecard per chapter, and each chapter gets a one-sentence summary. With past novels, I refused to start drafting until the notecard outline was completely fleshed out, but more recently, I’ve loosened this process. A handful of notecards is enough to get me writing.
With The Hitchcock Hotel, I knew from day one the twist that would happen halfway through the story. Without giving too much away, the challenge of that development was the main reason I wanted to write this book.
As you were writing, did you ever surprise yourself with a scene you created or the actions of any of your characters?
I knew from the beginning who would be murdered but didn’t know the killer’s identity until probably halfway through my first draft. I also knew most of the hijinks that would take place (poisoning, slashed tires, etc.) but not who was behind them. It was a lot of fun making the puzzle pieces fit together along the way.
Along with the obvious Hitchcock inspiration, who or what else, if anything, inspired your work on the novel?
Voyeurism is one of the major themes of The Hitchcock Hotel. In 2016, a New Yorker article by Guy Talese, called “The Voyeur’s Motel,” caught my attention. I devoured the piece with great interest, then moved on. Back then, I had no plans to write a story about a voyeur. Still, the visual of Gerald Foos’ spying platform lodged itself somewhere in the back of my brain. Seven years later, I put it to use.
Only after finishing this novel did I realize it had a precursor. In 2017 I wrote a short story entitled “Open Windows” about a neighborhood Peeping Tom named Jasper. I had totally forgotten about the story! I’ve now unintentionally written two stories starring voyeurs. Sometimes I’m unaware of my preoccupations until I’ve written (multiple!) stories about them.
Finally, we’ve all got our favourite Hitch films (Rear Window for me); what is yours and why?
Rear Window is an excellent choice. It’s hard to pick just one, but let’s go with Rope. The murder happens during the opening scene. The rest of the movie is spent watching the two murderers try to prevent some party guests from discovering the victim’s body. This is a very simple premise with few surprises, yet I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I learned a lot about suspense vs. surprise from that film.
Stephanie Wrobel grew up in Chicago but has been living in the UK for the last four years with her husband and her dog, Moose Barkwinkle. She has an MFA from Emerson College and has had short fiction published in Bellevue Literary Review. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a creative copywriter at various advertising agencies. Darling Rose Gold is her first novel.