Talk us through it
The Lodgepole Pine Motel isolated in mountain country outside Melbourne on Halloween evening. Three of the cabins will be occupied by people with things to hide, and the motel Owner/Manager Madge Frasier also has her own skeletons in the closet. Two young hoons, who aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, have something they want to get rid of. A married couple are escaping a mistake they made earlier in the evening. And a serial killer has his latest victim to torment. How do these people related to each other and what secrets will be revealed as Halloween evening progresses to a stormy conclusion. Will anyone survive the last motel they find them self's checking into. Ready to check into the motel that dripped blood?
Review"Who knows how long it will take the other boy to reach someone. He might've already called the police." - JudyThe Last Motel is the sort of book someone like Guy Ritchie should make into a movie. It's got a very similar vibe to the Director's last couple of outings. McBean's characters don't know each other, besides current partners, but they are all interrelated in a web that threatens to destroy them all. During the course of the novel we get to find out how the characters are linked, how their past actions will come back to haunt them, and how each character has something in their background that they now may or may not regret. McBean weaves a tale that is at once unbelievable yet by novel's end becomes totally believable. You will be caught up in the prose and you will want to know what happens to the individuals confronting a situation that only one of them could ever have conceived of. McBean writes at breakneck pace and discards overly descriptive passages in order to keep the novel moving towards a conclusion that I certainly didn't see coming. On page 9, for example, "Eddy gripped the two wires under the dashboard and unhooked them". You can pick up a whole world of meaning with that simple sentence without the Author having to over state things. McBean gives you exactly what you need to know without bogging down at any stage. This may not work for say a ghost story, but in terms of a psycho novel it's exactly what you need. Here the author isn't trying to give us a blasé look inside a natural born killer's head, he's telling you there's a serial killer involved and this is what happened. We meet each character in the present of the novel as they book into the motel under the watchful eye of Madge who perceives all's not well in the state of Melbourne. However McBean takes time out as things develop to give us the background dirt on each character and thus puts them into context for the core question The Last Motel asks. Each character is guilty of a past indiscretion, but do they deserve the fate awaiting them at the LodgePool Pine Motel? McBean doesn't draw any conclusion or give you any inkling as to what he thinks, the author simply leaves it to the reader to make up his or her own mind. I kind of like that approach, and for sure dug the dual timelines going down that surprisingly all take place on the same day. A couple of the novel's constructs point to the fact that we have a first time novelist who is already on top of his craft. I hate to think what McBean is going to do by novel five if he's this good at novel one. Through out The Last Motel various characters listen to some radio station that from the sounds of things is taking time out of it's greatest hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. A radio newscaster, and you can imagine this would be delivered in a breathless voice, can helpfully inform us the police are searching for the person or persons responsible for the murder of seven young men, and are also investigating a fatal shooting of an eighteen year old in Lilydale. McBean introduces this early in the novel and keeps refraining it, guess what two events will bring our various motel denizens together in fairly bloody fashion? The author also doesn't leave that storm that's been brewing for most of the novel forgotten, when the brown stuff hits the fan the storm unleashes it's full fury on the mountain that dripped blood and try as I might I just couldn't keep the word "tempest" from ringing in my mind as I read through the final few chapters of The Last Motel. Generally an Author, or in some cases a movie maker, will use weather conditions to reflect the internal thinking of one or more characters, here McBean simply says to hell with it mayhem's going down let the weather be a metaphor for that. Sterling stuff and once again another aspect of the novel that was working for me. Okay McBean as a writer is most closely identified with U.S purveyor of the macabre Richard Laymon. (I'm actually going to draw a parallel with another Writer in the next paragraph, but hey where's a Down Under "beast house" type of a novel Brett?) So considering Laymon's output The Last Motel really isn't the sort of book you may want your young teen daughter or elderly Aunt to read. Assuming of course your family aren't operating in a sort of Addams family environment. Not only is McBean not holding back on the claret but he has his deviant sex angle covered as well. The author can be quite explicit about things when he feels the need. So be warned you are not reading anything like a Jane Austen novel here or a parlour acceptable ghost story. As opposed to the hundred and one comparisons of Brett McBean to Richard Laymon I was actually thinking more along the lines of the Brit writer Shaun Hutson. McBean has the same sort of economy of description that Hutson has and the same realisation that major gore scenes should be explored in depth to impact the reader. Neither writer is ever going to have something going down off page that's crucial to a novel's flow, both are saying you are in a horror novel, and in a horror novel vampires simply don't sparkle during the daytime they explode into flames. I read McBean's first novel in a sort of daze as the author lock and loaded on the graphic nature of events going down at the motel. I got dragged into things and was half way through The Last Motel before I realised I wasn't taking any notes and jotting down thoughts. A second read was definitely required and during my subsequent booking in at the motel I released how tight things have been crafted. There's plenty of portents as to what's to come and nothing is left waving in the air making you wonder if the author simply forgot about it. Impressed? Hell yeah, I've ordered another McBean novel The Mother and a collection that has one of his novellas in it, on the strength of The Last Motel. Rumour has it that the writer has a zombie novel currently doing the rounds, could someone pick that one up stat!
ScaryMinds Rates this read as ... A must read Australian horror novel folks. Trample your family if they don't get out of the way quick
enough as you rush out the door to grab your copy today!
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