Ghosts are business left unfinished. Reminders of a wrong that needs righting. They are the unbalanced ledger, and, in the United States, unpaid debts never truly die. In Erika T. Wurth’s novel “The Haunting of Room 904,” ghosts appear on Page 1, and the debt they point to looms large over the entire story.
Olivia Becente, a Native paranormal investigator, is hired to break the curse of a hotel room where women, at regular five-year intervals, mysteriously meet violent ends. The case leads her to another tragedy, one that both dwarfs and ties together the individual deaths: the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. But this summary makes the book sound more serious than it is.
What horror exists in these pages is blunted by the novel’s persistent tendency toward moralizing. Take, for example, the first exorcism Olivia performs. A young woman who has purchased a “dybbuk box” off eBay is subsequently plagued by nightmares and waking visions of her deceased father. A grieving and angry Cheyenne two-spirit presence resides in the box and has sought out the young woman because she is descended from a white person who participated in the massacre that decimated the Cheyenne tribe. How is the malevolent ghost exorcised from the box? Olivia has the young woman apologize for her ancestor’s role in the killings. On top of that, the woman feels compelled then to donate to the American Indian College Fund and to send a “formal, public apology to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes on behalf of her ancestor.” Problem solved.
“The Haunting of Room 904” is less horror and more urban fantasy in the mold of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Charmed,” where everyone is young and flirty and humor is deployed liberally. But where the aforementioned TV shows possessed structural narrative integrity and characters who took their jobs seriously, this novel abounds in plot holes. Characters hide and reveal information not because it was what they would actually do but because the story needs tension or because the characters are heading in the wrong direction and the course of their investigation must be righted.
Stock figures proliferate: the gay best friend, the mysterious, mustache-stroking cult leader, the deceased sibling who serves as fount for the protagonist’s unresolved guilt, a cartoonishly evil ex-boyfriend who happens to be one of the richest men in town. Characters act inexplicably either to aid or to impede our hero, and high-stakes situations act like sticks of dynamite brought to you by the Acme Corporation, never detonating when they’re supposed to.
Appearing throughout, at irregular intervals, are scenes from “the Massacre,” as it is called in the narration. The gravity of those scenes jars strongly with the lightness of the rest of the novel, but rather than have the contrast render each aspect of the book more poignant, that contrast only muddles the tone. It’s like two family members trying to tell a story together but one is giggling and the other is on the verge of tears.
Reconstructing a horrific episode of American history in dollhouse miniature can make it easier to take in, but more difficult to take seriously. Every time a character seems to signal their virtue or learn the error of their or their ancestors’ ways, I feel I’m watching someone whip out an Amex card, as though the debt could be paid so easily. The ghosts deserve better.
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