‘The Haunted Hotel’ by Wilkie Collins

The Haunted Hotel is a lesser known work – a purely gothic story with interesting characters, haunted rooms and scandalous love affairs.

Without spoiling the plot, there is a lot making it a page turner. A hush-hush marriage, a scorned lover, rivalry between brothers, missing servants and phantom visions – so much repressed Victorian goodness!

Collins creates a fair amount of sympathy for almost each character in the book. It is hard to dislike any character. A murder is committed in the first half of the book. Our detective in this case is the scorned lover, unwittingly pulled into the mainstream. As a reader, you may have already categorized your cast into evil and angelic, but one can never too sure.

The word is haunted in the title is slightly misleading, as there is not much of spooky stuff happening. Chilling and gory maybe – but not haunting.

This is not an elaborate blog post and nor is the book probably Wilkie Collins’ best works, but I only put it here because it’s a nice gothic story ideal for a rainy or cold evening.

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