Since it’s summer time – why not travel to a remote resort – all inclusive – with an activities director that’s bound to make your stay memorable?

“There’s no such thing as ghosts. I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t come walking down this trail in the middle of the night. But I sure don’t think bodies are floating in a pool that dozens of people swim in every day and that’s cleaned and inspected each morning.

Join a mystery in the making. A gardner dancing a jig, a disappearing body in the water, a room which keeps having parties that nobody else can hear, and a weird apathy that seem to follow the guests as they get greeted with increasingly disturbing sequences.

Continue reading at your own peril.

The Plot

The Reata is an exclusive spa isolated in the Arizona desert—a perfect getaway from the city for people like Lowell Thurman and his family, booked for a relaxing five-day retreat. But what unfolds is anything but tranquil…unnerving encounters with strange employees, wild parties in empty rooms, something unspeakable in the pool. Then one by one, guests begin disappearing. The Thurmans are afraid—because out in the middle of nowhere, with no escape, and no one to hear them scream, they’re left with only one terrifying choice: unlock the dark secrets of The Reata themselves before the real carnage begins.

Trigger warning: Animal mutilation, rape, murder, orgies, ritualistic sacrifices and a vampire.

They gathered around. In the dry open area, Rachel saw a little corral and a barn made out of papier mâché surrounded by bonsai pine trees. Nailed to the hard-packed dirt with skinny overlong spikes were rats. Dead rats that had been shaved bald and lacquered with some sort of clear glossy finish to make them shine. One of them was positioned on its hind legs in front of the barn, its pink pointy whiskerless face overlooking the scene before it. Another was situated next to the corral fence and dressed in a ragged piece of black cloth. Still others were arranged in a semicircle looking out at the bonsai trees. There was new blood saturating the dirt on which the barn was located, and what looked like an unborn kitten lying curled behind the papier-mâché structure, its translucent eyelids closed tightly

I loved how the book skirts around its own unbelievable matter in a way that defies logic:

That was one thing he’d learned from reading all of those paranormal books: there wasn’t always an understandable reason. People always wanted a simple cause-and-effect explanation for everything; it made horror easier to take somehow, made it seem more logical. But it wasn’t logical. Just as religious people always said that God works in mysterious ways, that the ways of the Lord were unknowable, so, too, he thought, were the ways of the paranormal.
Of evil.
Yes, he thought. Whatever was here was definitely evil.

The secondary themes of the book revolve around a high-school reunion our main character is avoiding with this recreational stop and how we’re not truly out of high-school wherever we go. Some of the musing were quite interesting and it reminded me of Friend Request: The most addictive psychological thriller you’ll read this year by Laura Marshall

[…] his mind brought it all back to high school. He had sometimes wondered in the intervening years how the practically sociopathic kids who’d terrorized the hallways had been able to dial it down enough to get along in regular society, how they’d managed to find jobs and wives and a life in the real world when, deep down, they were the same assholes they had always been.
Because they covered it up, he thought now. Because they pretended to be people they were not.
Here, they were allowed to be themselves, their ids granted free rein.

All in all I loved the scene setting, the horror tropes, the fleshy spiders (do not read this book if you’re an arachnophobe like me). It has sounds, visuals, smells and an ever-lasting sense of “not-right”. Something’s not right. People smile too much. People forget too easily when the sun is up and the pool is filled in.

The room was suffused in a red glow. The slats of the upper right shutter were opening and closing on their own, resembling nothing more than the winking of an eye, and there was a pulsing beneath the covers on the bed that made it appear as if the mattress was home to some type of monstrous amoeba. A persistent shadow in the corner, roughly the shape of a monkey, danced hyperkinetically, although there was no figure in the room to which it even remotely corresponded.
“Fuck,” David breathed. “Oh fuck.”

I think if the book was just a little bit smarter, it could really be an allegory of people on holiday – how by the end of it they want to squeeze out as much joy and entertainment they can from the venue, from the staff, from the other people. Look at me, I’m having fun. But are you really? Or are you forcing yourself to really enjoy it since you should? You paid for it, it’s a holiday that only happens rarely so you stick it out and push for more and more.

They’d turned savage in the night, and whatever their original classes or occupations—rich or poor, janitor or stock broker—they were now children of the desert, spawn of The Reata, and they returned to the ruined buildings looking for scapegoats, looking for blood.

In the end, what really broke the spell for me and the mystery of the La Reata resort was the boredom that almost always instills itself in a book when it takes it too long to reach a conclusion. Just like a holiday that’s a little bit longer than it should be, the book reaches a point where the characters keep repeating actions they’ve already done, chasing other people, walking around confused and not really doing anything. I was bored about 100 pages to the finish line and I dutifully fulfilled my reader task but I wasn’t really in it anymore.

A good read for about 2/3 but otherwise this is going to the charity bin.