When Shari Lapena stormed the literary market, just a few years ago, we were introduced to an author with her particular stamp of domestic thrillers, halfway between the cinematographic of the rear window of Alfred Hitchcock, and even touching that reading tension of great novels like Misery and the shining, of Stephen King.
It is about looking for the imbalance in the comfort zone, redrawing those scenarios of kind meanings such as home and security, to open ourselves to assumptions that shake the foundations of our consciousness. Because if the known, if the people from our inner circles present themselves to us as strangers of whom we do not know everything, the suspense is assured.
It is not surprising then that the novel The couple next door, with which Lapena traveled from Canada to the rest of the world, reach that label of a domestic thriller in which the shadows of suspicion suddenly loom over a world constructed from the protagonists' own subjectivity. Characters who need to escape their normal patterns in order to peer into the crudest truth that has come to destabilize everything.
I recently read about the conception of home, about what each of us considers our home to be, from the symbolic conquest of a toothbrush in the bathroom to the configuration of the home around the family.
There are those who make each hotel their home, for work imperatives or for any other circumstances. It's just that a hotel is ultimately inhabited by strangers who are shared life with in the hallways or at the breakfast buffet.
The Mitchell's Inn hotel is that bucolic place away from the madding crowd where each new guest comes to heal wounds or to charge batteries, to find himself or someone who should never belong to his official life. A temporary home for restless consciences ...
Telling a story of suspense in the surroundings of a hotel necessarily evokes Agatha Christie. And certainly this novel offers a plantation that connects with that great writer.
And then the question arises as to whether Lapena will be up to the task ... The storm arrives at the place with that telluric noséqué and the elements that already awaken our most atavistic alert. The hotel runs out of electricity and darkness becomes the perfect ally for that dark side of some of the guests who, having come there to purge sins, to find rest or to carry out some marital deception, may find themselves pushed to his darkest instincts or find the perfect environment for his revenge.
A story that, although part of an argument already probed, is capable of keeping us tied to the plot.
You can now buy the novel An Unexpected Guest, the new book by Shari Lapena, here: