Unspeakable Horror!

Like most readers, my to-be-read pile seems to grow exponentially every year. In between review requests, I had some time and dug one from the Bentley Little catalog out of the vault.

The Resort is one of those books only a writer with a loyal following like Little can get away with. Little, who is to the Southwest what Stephen King is to Maine, again sets his titular terror deep in the Arizona desert and again uses a working class family as the protagonists of this 2004 tome. Lowell Thurman and his wife Rachel are set to enjoy a well-deserved vacation with their family – teenage twins Curtis and Owen and thirteen-year-old Ryan – at an exclusive desert resort called The Reata. It’s the type of accommodations that the supermarket cashier and his family can only afford in the off-season. But what first appears to be a gleaming oasis in the mercilessly arid desert soon becomes a freakshow of depraved horrors. Like King’s haunted hotel in The Shining, The Reata is one of those malevolent lodgings that slowly gets under the skin and into the minds of its guests, taking advantage of insecurities and weaknesses until the guests slowly degenerate into full-on violence-fueled depravity.

The Resort, which is broken into sections denoting each day of the family’s five-night stay, tastes more like an experimental stew than an accomplished horror scribe’s umpteenth novel. With everything but the kitchen sink thrown in including old Indian curses, the fountain of youth, mind control, and human sacrifices, The Resort never hits its mark – instead taking readers on an inconsistent trip akin to riding through the back lot of Universal, with props from a zillion different movies all thrown together in one incongruous warehouse heap.

At times, readers are reminded of how effective a storyteller Little really is; other moments reinforce the idea that he’s capable of better. The novel is a mishmash of imagery, some of which works quite effectively and some of which fails miserably. Readers will shudder as Little paints vivid mental pictures of the macabre garden of horrors behind the resort, ominous southwestern thunderstorms, and the rain soaked poolside transmogrification of the hotel staff. Sadly, interspersed between these genuinely effective moments are a disturbing sadomasochistic husband/wife golf game, a canine abortion in a toilet, and a human stew complete with veggies and an apple in the mouth of a human sacrifice that at times will cause the reader to alternate between gross-out grimaces and out loud guffaws. Little has never shied away from overt sexuality in his novels, but some of the explicitness here feels forced and gratuitous somehow, and at times certain passages are downright disturbing.

Secondary characters disconcertingly blip on and off the radar screen throughout the novel, giving the book a feeling of imbalance. Characters that Little takes time developing disappear early on; others that have been mentioned in passing re-appear late into the third act with fairly substantial roles. Worse, the backstory seems to unfurl all at once late in the narrative instead of gradually unfolding throughout the novel, giving the distinct impression that Little himself discovered the big “why” late in the game.

In The Resort, Little questions human behavior and what turns mild-mannered working Joe’s into depraved killing machines, exploring the forces that grant their ids this free reign. Readers will find themselves asking similar questions, like what makes good writers write mediocre books. Ultimately more Budget Inn than Hilton, The Resort is a passable timeshare weekend getaway versus a full-blown luxury resort vacation.