One day, Claudia gets up from the bed where her body has been rotting and, without telling her husband, leaves the house. By the second page, she is living in an abandoned hotel by the sea. As her husband manipulates the landscape around her, tangling the streets and congealing the sea, Claudia encounters a series of cryptic women—runaways, alcoholics, husband killers, ghosts. The Seaside Hotel is a tale of escape fringed with madness and gloom. As Claudia becomes increasingly inhabited by the other women she meets, the borders of her being break down and blur. An exploration of memory, mutability, solitude, and time, The Seaside Hotel is above all an experiment in fiction—an inquiry into what you have left, when you’ve left everything behind.
Michael Holt grew up in Seattle, and generally lives in San Francisco, though at the moment he finds himself in Palermo, Italy. His fiction has appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, and The Collagist, and his short story collection, How We Got Into This, is forthcoming from 11:11 Press.
Physical Info: 7x5x0.24 inches | 84 Pages | Paperback