Review: The Nightly Disease
The Nightly Disease by Max Booth III
My rating: [rating=3]
Blurb:
Sleep is just a myth created by mattress salesmen.
Isaac, a night auditor of a hotel somewhere in the surreal void of Texas, is sick and tired of his guests. When he clocks in at night, he’s hoping for a nice, quiet eight hours of Netflix-bingeing and occasional masturbation. What he doesn’t want to do is fetch anybody extra towels or dive face-first into somebody’s clogged toilet. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to get involved in some trippy owl conspiracy or dispose of any dead bodies. But hey…that’s life in the hotel business.
Welcome to The Nightly Disease. Please enjoy your stay.
Review:
[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]
This one’s a bit of an oddball: the story of Isaac, night auditor in a hotel in Texas, spending his days sleeping and his nights in the drudgery of his job full of annoying customers, endless requests and weird happenings. And ‘weirder and weirder’ is how his nights become throughout the stories, from the moment he meets his new colleague Mandy who wants to pet an owl, and gets involved with Kia the bulimic homeless girl. Follows a gallery of shady characters, odd encounters, bodies piling up, and owls. (Yes, owls. The little creeps.)
I can’t tell whether I enjoyed this novel or not. It’s very bizarre, and Isaac’s descent into this half-believable, half-what-the-hell crazy world, was a mix of enjoyable and uncomfortable. (I it’s not the gory side that created that feeling for me, but the bulimic girl—to be fair, that’s probably because I myself have a history of eating disorders.)
On the other hand, the depiction of hotel jobs was quite funny, and the various circumstances Isaac had to fend through, from clogged toilets to murdered customers, even though somewhat unbelievable, had just enough of a touch of ‘based on something real’ for the surreal parts to flow in a… logical way, should I say? In that sort of inner logic pertaining the book.
Conclusion: 3 stars. Interesting and funny enough for me to probably try another novel by this author at some point.