An
Unexpected Guest
by Bruce E. Johnson
2011 / Knock On Wood Publications / $14.95 297 pages /
Illustrated (B/W Photographs)
Once again I have to thank my family for adding another volume on ghosts to
my library shelves. This time the contributors were my son and his wife who
recently stayed at the famed Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.
Active overseas service necessitated a return to Europe too soon, but before
his departure they gifted me with a numbered and double-autographed Author's
Special First Edition of the novel, An Unexpected Guest.
This is Bruce E. Johnson's fourteenth published work, the third in which the
historic resort is featured. In a departure from his core genre of
specialized artisan fare, he has crafted a truly superb story of mystery and
intrigue. The inclusion of black and white photographs, courtesy of the
Grove Park Inn collection and the author's own, lend a haunting, almost
voyeuristic, visual impact. A nostalgic sense of a dim yesteryear is
recalled. Elegant dress and manners are refreshed. Long dead faces on fading
paper are revived, yet too, the images evoke a wistful sadness. Inscrutable,
almost brooding in its looming granite presence, the hotel stands as a
testament to Time's illusory nature. It remains when so many of its guests
no longer do.
Since its opening in July of 1913 Grove Park Inn has been renowned for its
luxurious, four-star hospitality, scenic mountain surroundings, and colossal
hunting lodge architecture. Throughout the decades the hotel has catered to
presidents and industrialists, politicians and inventors, the wealthy elite
and the creme of society while they lodged beneath the grand shelter of its
towering roof. The inn has welcomed many returning visitors, but no one so
often as the Pink Lady. As apparition-in-residence, the slight phantom has
been spotted down through the years by both guests and staff.
Encounters are brief, a fleeting glimpse of pink, a hint of a whisper, or
more often, a gentle touch by an unseen hand. A sleeper may occasionally be
roused by a chill tickling on the feet or awaken to puzzle over the game of
hide-and-seek that small items seem to have played during the night. The
Pink Lady's identity is shrouded in mystery, but the circumstances
surrounding her demise are not. Lore has it that in the early years of the
hotel's operation a young woman plummeted to her death from an interior
balcony to the Palm Court sixty feet below. Whether the fall was accidental
or something more sinister remains a matter of speculation, which Mr.
Johnson has successfully interwoven with factual events to produce an
enthralling and original book.
Whether the order of the day included a round of golf, a nature walk, or
merely a restful chair on an expansive fresh air terrace, the inn's acclaim
had always been rooted in the perfection of its guest accommodation
services, a rigid standard of excellence implemented and unfailingly
enforced by Frederick L. Seely, founding President of Grove Park Inn, Inc.
As the architect and mastermind instrumental to the resort's construction
and smooth operation, Seely is portrayed as a driven, meticulous man;
ambitious and autocratic; publicly diplomatic but privately prejudiced; a
cynical realist beneath cultivated urbanity; a compassionate sensualist and
a sexually frustrated husband; wildly contemptuous of Edwin Grove, Jr., his
dissipated, deviant brother-in-law; financially under obligation to his
wealthy and domineering father-in-law, E.W. Grove, and crushingly resentful
of that burdensome fact.
The tale concentrates its hypnotic focus upon the evening of August 27,
1918. Amid a backdrop of characters which include Thomas Edison, Henry Ford,
the Harvey Firestones, both father and son, all on a break from a much
publicized camping trip, and young Cornelia Vanderbilt, heiress to the her
late father George's philanthropic millions and the vast private fiefdom
known as Biltmore Estate, the appearance of a dead body clad in pink
requires more than just the usual, unfaltering hospitality. Not only are the
impeccable reputation and future of the hotel at stake, but the outcome of
the night is pivotal to Frederick's personal and commercial fortunes as
well, and he is not the sort to allow an unexpected guest to shatter all he
has striven his entire life to achieve.
Seely gambles everything against both known and unknown nemeses in a
riveting match of escalating psychological brinksmanship. The further the
story progresses, the stronger the reader's guilty sense of conspiratorial
intimacy grows. As each of Frederick's calculated actions, ponderous
suspicions, and imperiled decisions are laid bare, a goading urgency
intensifies until it approaches the tortuously sublime. Only when the
fevered pace can no longer be sustained, the author delivers a final page
denouement as keenly worthy of this fine mystery as it was wholly
unanticipated. Despite the fact that An Unexpected Guest
is an acknowledged work of fiction, I was left with the vivid impression
that a substantial truth had been exposed, and a measure of long denied
acknowledgment granted to the Pink Lady of Grove Park Inn.
A proviso to this recommendation of Mr. Johnson's book relates to the
graphic descriptions of two sexual encounters. The referenced passages were
not deemed gratuitous nor overly coarse in use of terminology by this
reviewer as their inclusion necessarily advanced the plot, but were of
sufficiently explicit nature to warrant a strong advisory regarding age
appropriateness.
5 ***** of 5 ***** / LadyJEM - August 27, 2011