The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins, 1878, 251 pages.

Genre: classic, british, suspense

Basic Overview: English Lord Mountbarry throws over his charming fiancee for the scheming Countess Narona, and after their marriage, calamity ensues. Murder, mysterious disappearances, ghosts, strange revulsions, and the city of Venice feature in this suspense story.

Personal Opinion: The Haunted Hotel was so much unlike the dense, detailed, carefully plotted stories by Wilkie Collins that I have come to know and love so much. It was simplistic, uninteresting, with no character development, an ending you could have guessed a mile off, and with nothing but determination to steer me towards finishing the book. I was really surprised at how the mighty Collins had fallen.
A quick trip to Wikipedia gave me some biographical details that explained the whole thing. Apparently Collins, suffering from rheumatic gout, became addicted to opium in the form of laudanum, and after the death of his closest friend, Charles Dickens, in 1870, Collins became increasingly addicted to the point of suffering paranoid delusions, and believing that he had a doppelganger with him at all times, whom he called "Ghost Wilkie". Wikipedia says that "his novels and novellas of the 1870s and 1880s....are generally regarded as inferior to his previous productions and receive comparatively little critical attention today".

I was really disappointed in this book. Expecting my usual fun Wilkie Collins read, I instead read 251 pages of drivel. Not a good choice, and a waste of my time.

34 / 100 (34.0%)