Gothic literature — with its depictions of doomed aristocrats and centuries-old family estates — is predominantly non-Jewish. In The Hotel Neversink...Adam O’Fallon Price upends the tropes of the genre by placing them in an intrinsically Jewish setting: the Catskills ... As in traditional Gothic literature, the threat of the uncanny lingers throughout the novel. But O’Fallon Price also masterfully evokes historical detail, and this blend of sensationalism and realism allows him to question the class and gender assumptions that underpin Gothic fiction — as well as Jews’ place in literary genres usually closed off to them.
The Hotel Neversink is a historical microcosm, a family saga, and literary mystery—all elements that work together to engrossing effect ... In its focus on the personalities that keep the hotel going, Price’s novel is riveting and sensitive. Their foibles and fears, dramas and dreams propel the book’s pages. Though their Judaism sometimes feels filtered, it dictates their persistence, and it’s no minor feat that third-generation Len remains devout in an area that isn’t a flourishing Jewish center—at least, not in the hotel’s lean years. As much about a place as it is about a people, The Hotel Neversink is worth checking into—so long as you lock your door tight.
...a [roomy] and...ambitious affair, packing in a large cast, encompassing 100 years of family history and juggling a variety of narrative styles, genres and registers. Price takes big risks that allow him to perform dizzying feats ... Despite a grisly discovery and the odd spooky presentiment, The Hotel Neversink is not as creepy as it should be. But what it lacks in chills it more than makes up for in gripping family drama and masterful storytelling.
... a remarkably lyrical book, rooted into the evocative time and place that is the mid-20th century Catskills and beyond ... The crime is at last solved—or more precisely the solution is arrived at—in a final chapter that is meant to crystallize the ambiguities that haunt all the main characters. Yet the solution is perfunctory and unsatisfying—certainly not worth the work it took to follow the thread of the story by piecing together the voices of the various narrators over the years. The Hotel Neversink is an ambitious, skillfully written book. But it places considerable demands on its reader, which prevented this reviewer from thoroughly engaging with it.
Part genealogy, part murder mystery, part ghost story, the book’s ambitions overwhelm its scope. The result is a powerfully wrought novel of a specifically American place and time inhabited by appealing characters who are only fuzzily sketched. A last-minute revelation resolves the book’s central mystery with unconvincing, explosive drama, and the reader is left wondering not what will happen next to the suffering Sikorskys but rather where all the careful nuance of the previous pages has gone.
...striking ... Price focuses each chapter on a single character, which gives the work a novel-in-stories feel that periodically drifts from the hotel. As a result, the central mystery moves into the background, yet it never fully vanishes, wearing on characters without their acknowledgement as they face marital strain, addiction, and depression. Price is a sharp writer, and his novel wonderfully critiques family obligation while simultaneously delivering a crafty, sinister whodunit.
