RavePloughshares...gorgeously eerie ... Buoyed by van den Berg’s sinuous, marvelous sentences, the novel is...a deep dive into memory, love, and loss as filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid, sunstroked cityscape of Havana. A lesser writer might have lost themself in this byzantine world of maybe-doppelgangers and maybe-zombies and maybe-madness, but Laura van den Berg is one of our most accomplished storytellers—it is no surprise that she has elevated the uncannily horrifying into something achingly human ... The Third Hotel is undoubtedly the creation of a singular imagination, and though van den Berg writes into and around theories of horror cinema, she does so without sacrificing the enigmatic ephemerality of fiction.
