Book Review: The Last Room On The Left by Leah Konen

If you only went by her Instagram and other social media, Kerry Walsh would be very much living the writer’s dream. After a short story she’d written was published in The New Yorker and went viral, she landed a six-figure publishing deal for a novel based on the story, with potentially more to come given the interest a famous director has in adapting her finished book for the screen. Trouble is, it’s been a year and a half since she signed the contract and she only has a handful of additional book pages to show for it.

That would be bad enough on its own. Unfortunately, Kerry also has a huge drinking problem. It’s gotten so bad that it’s cost her her marriage and her relationship with her best friend. In a last ditch effort to both dry out and finish her book, she agrees to take on a caretaker position at a remote but social-media-friendly motel. She knows full well that this is the stuff that horror movies are made of, but she’s both desperate and confident in her own abilities:

A gust of wind smacked me across the face as I got out of the car, reminding me what I’d signed myself up for. It was no wonder the place shut down in January and February. Who in their right mind would want to come here in the deep of winter[?]

 

And yet for me, it was perfect, my own little Overlook Hotel, where I could finish my book (minus the ghosts, psychotic break, and homicide, of course). And unlike Jack Torrance, I didn’t even have a family to terrorize and I wasn’t going to be drinking a single drop. All work and no play was finally going to make Kerry a truly successful girl.

Things are weird almost from the moment she arrives at the Twilite Motel. She’d been directed by the owner to stay in Room 13, but finds it still occupied with the belongings and party paraphernalia of the previous caretaker, who seems to have abruptly disappeared. A cranky neighbor is all too ready to pick a bone with Kerry over property lines, never mind the fact that she has no influence over the matter. And a massive blizzard is bearing down on the area, threatening to take the power out with it.

Kerry is ready to grit her teeth and persevere through all of this, taking another room instead and steadfastly ignoring all the alcohol left in Room 13. But figures keep flitting in and out of the woods surrounding the building. There’s evidence of strangers being where they shouldn’t be in what’s supposed to be an unoccupied motel. And then she finds a dead body in the snow.

Kerry immediately runs for help. Her skeptical neighbor gets the police to come calling, but by the time they all head back to where she saw it, the body has gone missing. The police treat her with kindness but are way too busy with the blizzard to keep looking for a corpse that may or may not even exist. A disoriented Kerry has no idea what to do, as her instincts encourage her to fall back on her usual coping mechanisms:

You can handle this, Kerry, [her husband’s voice] was crowing, straight into my brain. You don’t need pills or booze or your phone to numb yourself. You’re strong.

 

And what if I’m not? I thought. I’d been white-knuckling it without drink for the last three weeks, and what had it gotten me? I was up here alone, potentially imagining bodies. I only wanted something–just a little something–to take the edge off, to soften the frantic corners of my mind. To warm my insides, prepare for a night with no power, no phones, nothing to do but fear the worst.

 

Something that had always worked to calm me down before.

As Kerry fights the siren song of her addiction, stranger and more ominous things keep happening. The body reappears… or does it? And Kerry discovers that her connection with the corpse may not be as coincidental as she’d initially believed. . .

This is one of those books where I hesitate to say too much for fear of ruining the plentiful twists, as an alcoholic writer struggles to separate fact from fiction during an increasingly unsettling stay at a place that is far more sinister than its picture-perfect exterior would have you believe. Leah Konen is open about her influences in this book, which only adds to the suspense: sure, we know what happened in the other media to which she’s paying homage, but is that what’s really going on here, too? While some of the twists struck me as unnecessary, others genuinely astonished me, especially in relation to the missing caretaker. Smart, fun, and fiercely feminist, this is an excellent thriller for anyone who wants a less supernatural (and arguably more satisfying) version of Stephen King’s The Shining.