Ian Mond Reviews The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham

The Invisible Hotel, Yeji Y. Ham (Zando 978-1-63893-137-9, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2024.

Early on in Yeji Y. Ham’s intense debut novel, The Invisible Hotel, our narrator, Yewon, describes her mother’s daily ritual of cleaning of their ances­tor’s bones in the family’s bathtub.

My stomach began to thrash. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to smell it. Heat, breath, sweat, the odor that rose into the air and found no escape. Trapped inside for too long. Rotting. Decayed. The nauseat­ing stench that rose from the bathtub. The stench that had become the skin of our home. The wet, sticky smell, as though it were screaming to me: this is how you’d smell if you died.

It’s startling, visceral imagery in a book over­flowing with startling visual imagery, a novel that employs the language and motifs of horror fiction to speak powerfully about generational trauma.

We follow Yewon, a young woman living with her mother in the small village of Dalbitsori – Dalbit for short. Since finishing school, she’s been desperate to leave the town, either moving to Seoul with her best friend Min or heading to Sydney to study English. But Yewon can’t seem to escape Dalbit. With Yewon’s sister in Seoul (deal­ing with problems of her own) and her brother, Jae-hyun, enlisted in the army, there’s no one to keep an eye on her mother, especially now that the yearly ritual of cleaning the bones has become a daily obsession. Then there are the nightmares that have invaded Yewon’s sleep and are now creeping into her daily life. The same nightmare of a decaying, rotting hotel populated by hollowed-out people – including the scary older man from the village – and a series of endless rooms waiting for a key – the same reddish bronze key Yewon’s owned since she can remember. While struggling to deal with these issues, Yewon is confronted with the legacy of the Korean War in the form of Ms. Han, a refugee from North Korea who pays Yewon to take her to the prison where her brother resides, whom Ms. Han hasn’t seen for decades. It’s in witnessing Ms. Han’s anguish, the separation from her family, and the awful death of her daughter that Yewon comes to understand that she, her mother, and Ms. Han share variants of the same trauma.

Ham could have chosen to write The Invis­ible Hotel as a realist novel. Ms. Han’s appalling experiences, or the ‘‘scary’’ elderly gentleman in Dalbit who turns out to be replaying the trauma he suffered as a child during the War (a Church full of civilians, burnt down by North Korean soldiers), are awful enough without the need to resort to the gothic or supernatural. And yet, in embracing the conventions of horror fiction, Ham recognises that the genre, at its very best, creates an im­mediacy, forcing the protagonist and the reader to confront something unfiltered and elemental. Yewon, through her encounters with the hotel, intimately experiences the suffering and anguish of a country split asunder by conflict. Ham takes this a step further with frequent depictions of food – every meal lavishly detailed – juxtaposed against the starvation suffered by North Koreans only two hours away and Yewon’s inability to eat, her stomach glutted by what she’s witnessed in the Hotel and her mother’s constant, never-ending scrubbing of their ancestor’s bones. It doesn’t make for easy reading. But then, it’s not meant to.

While I hesitate to compare the anguish suf­fered by different ethnicities and cultures, it was difficult not to reflect on the current conflict in the Middle East and the deep-seated trauma that has existed for decades across that region. Of course, it’s not just the Middle East (or Korea). Generational trauma is a global phenomenon – Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and too many other places each with its unique shape and texture, but all equally devastating – memories of pain and horror inherited across the generations. Ham gives us a taste of this in a remarkable scene set in a museum displaying artefacts from the Korean War. A fault in the sound system sees the sounds of war blast through the establishment.

The room was chaos. A man covered his ears and opened his mouth, but the whistling bullets shot through his words. A group of girls looked at each other’s faces. Terrified. Children ran shrieking back to their who took them in their arms… It couldn’t be real. Not war, not here.

If the Hotel represents the metaphysical and primal character of trauma, the scene in the mu­seum shows us how deeply ingrained the trauma goes, where, for a fleeting moment, a museum filled with patrons of all ages genuinely believe they are at war with North Korea.

The Invisible Hotel is an uncomfortable novel; some might find it too triggering to read. But it’s vital that the next generation of writers shaping our narrative continue to articulate the pain and anguish of war, to show us that it’s not an issue of long ago but one of right now.

This review and more like it in the March 2024 issue of Locus.

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