Inside the Insanity: *Book Tour & Giveaway* The Hotel by Jennifer Anne Gordon-GUEST POST

From Daylight to Madness

The Hotel Book 1

by Jennifer Anne Gordon

Genre: Psychological Suspense, Gothic Horror

The latest book from the critically acclaimed author of Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent; Jennifer Anne Gordon.

On an almost uninhabitable rocky island off the coast of Maine, a Hotel looms over the shore, an ever-present gray lady that stands strong like a guard, keeping watch. For many who come here, this island is a sanctuary and a betrayal.

This is a place where memories linger like ghosts, and the ephemeral nature of time begins to peel away ...like the sanity of all who have been unlucky enough to step foot on its shore.

In the late spring of 1873, Isabelle gave birth to her son Oscar, he cried for three startling minutes, and then went silent. During the months that follow, Isabelle is drugged and lulled into an almost hallucinatory world of grief and fear. Her life begins to feel as though it exists in a terrifying new reality separated from those around her ...

When her grieving begins to make her husband, Henry, uncomfortable, he and his mother conspire to send Isabelle away to a Summer Hotel on Dagger Island, where she can rest and heal. While they are adamant that the hotel is not an asylum and that Isabelle will be able to return eventually to her home, Isabelle understands in her heart that it is all a lie. That perhaps, everything about being a woman in this time, may have always been a lie.

Her family has lied to her, and she has lied to herself.

The Hotel, of course, is not what it seems, and the foreboding Dagger Island begins to feel more like a prison than a retreat. Isabelle hears relentless sounds coming from the attic above her room, and the ever-present cries of small children scream in her head almost constantly. Are they hallucinations, or are they connected to the small cemetery she found, filled with the fresh dirt of little graves, the brokenhearted reminders of people that no one believes ever existed?

She meets a fellow guest at the Hotel, a young, enigmatic, and deeply damaged priest, named Francis.

Together they teeter on the edges of reality and try desperately to become free from the fates that their pasts have bound them to.

From Daylight to Madness is a poetic, and haunting Gothic Fiction novel that is both profoundly unsettling and darkly romantic.

**Only .99 cents!!**

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When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk

The Hotel Book 2

Critically acclaimed Author Jennifer Anne Gordon's conclusion to The Hotel Series, with the sequel to From Daylight to Madness.

In one startling moment in the late summer of 1873 a tragedy fell like summer sun on the gray jagged shores of Dagger Island. Francis loses everything he thought his life was, and what it could have become. His heart breaks and his feet run, all the way back to his childhood home, he reaches for a past that may not exist.

He is there, in the little house in Dorchester Neck. A place haunted with missing time. He feels the comfort from walls that lean in too close, but then ...He feels the trauma that ripped his life in two and in a blink of an eye he is back at the hotel. He can feel the memories fade as the cold fingers of winter wrap around him. He does not know how he got there, or indeed if he ever left.

Francis has lived his whole life veiled in the memories that are more alive than his present. The current days fade away before he can hold on to him. Everything he was or thought he could have been is gone. He realizes he may be a monster, and the person he has fallen in love with may not even exist. Francis holds onto the memories he thinks are real ...until he is almost consumed by them.

Francis is isolated in a world of mesmerism, with his tormentor and healer Doctor Hughes.

Francis is a guest in this hotel with his past, his present, and who he believes to be his future. Isabelle. His world is a labyrinth ... he feels her hand in his. The fingers intertwine and there is nothing left but her ...

She is a memory, a ghost, and a hallucination.

He can almost remember the moment when his father’s glass shattered into his face...he can almost remember who he was before he was broken in two.

He can almost remember...

He can almost...

He can...

He...

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JENNIFER ANNE GORDON is a professional ballroom dancer and choreographer by day, and a curly haired neurotic writer by night. She is an actor, a traveler, a photographer, a lover of Gothic Horror, and a dog mom. She lives in the wilds of New Hampshire with her partner on and off the dance floor. Her novels include the Kindle Award for Horror 2020 Winning book, Beautiful, Frightening, and Silent, as well as the historical Gothic novel From Daylight to Madness (The Hotel #1) as well as When The Sleeping Dead Still Talk (The Hotel #2). She also has a published collection of her artwork, titled "Victoriana {mixed media art of jennifer anne gordon}.

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GUEST POST
Previously Published with LadiesOfHorrorFiction.com

The Authors to Blame if You Find Yourself Having Sex in a Cemetery.

Now, I think it’s safe to say that there are many types of people in the world, today I am going to be writing about one very specific type of person. The “Taphophile”, a word that stems from the Greek, meaning “to love graves”. PLEASE do not get this confused with “Necrophile” (being attracted to dead things) …these are two different types of fetishes.

Now, I guess my love affair with cemeteries started when I was young, you see, if I snuck out my back yard and walked just a few hundred blocks though my neighbor’s yard and past her very boisterous and barking Golden Retriever, Sandy, I was transported into another land. A land of quiet, rolling green hills and paths, a land of beautiful white stones all lined up like soldiers.

This cemetery became the meeting place for all the neighborhood misfit toys. The goth girls, the skate punks, the speed-walking, and jogging soccer moms, and the specific “cemetery picnicker”. Now you see, I alternated between the goth girl and the picnicker. The goth girl in me smoked her first cigarette in that cemetery, the goth girl would go to the cemetery with my friends during snowstorms and clear the graves and light the candles…we thought we were edgy, and spiritual, when truthfully we were probably just bored.

My love of the cemetery picnic stemmed from my general love of picnicking. Proper Picnicking, and by that I mean cucumber sandwiches, no crusts, pales cheeses and crackers, thin slices of pale lemon cakes, lemon snap cookies (No ginger snaps here, I’m no heathen), white sparkling wine, proper silverware and glasses, and of course…poetry books.

A proper cemetery picnic needs people to be lounging on their blanket, under their parasols, while reading Tennyson.

In fact, I am describing a very specific picnic that happened several years ago, in a Victorian Era Cemetery, somewhere in the wilds of Ohio. It was August, the heat, the wine, and the sun perhaps were getting to us (my partner and I) and somewhere after reading Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and before “The May Queen” … well, we of course had sex in the cemetery, in the middle of the day.

So that brings me to author #1 in my list of authors I blame for having sex in a cemetery.

Alfred Lord Tennyson – maybe it was the dusty antique copy of his complete works that I had, or the ephemeral feel of the paper turning to dust under my fingers as I turned the pages. Perhaps it was all the “beautiful and doomed women” in his poetry that made me throw caution to the wind…but yes, Tennyson is to blame for cemetery sex.

Edgar Allen Poe – Annabelle Lee is basically pornography for Taphophilia! Tell me you don’t want to rip off your clothes or someone else’s when you read the last part of that poem! Honestly if there was a study done of all the people who have had sex in cemeteries, I think at least 47% of them are directly tied to this. I’m not good at math, or studies, so this is really just an educated guess.

“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling-my darling-my life

And my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea-

In her tomb by the sounding sea”

Audrey Niffenegger – Now, most people will know her from her outstanding novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, but the reason why Audrey makes this list is because of Her Fearful Symmetry. A book so tender and beautiful, and her use of the location of Victorian Highgate Cemetery should almost be considered one of the main characters of that novel. Read that book for the cemetery but love that book for the strange and haunting love story that is at its center. It’s possible to fall in love with a ghost, it’s possible to be a ghost who feels passion, rage, regret, and longing.

Tracy Chevalier – Again, she is probably most well known for “The Girl With The Pearl Earring”, but instead my brain always goes to “Falling Angels” a book that explores the Victorian fascination with Death, and the burgeoning sexuality and changing social mores of the early Edwardian Era. The story focuses on the relationship of the two young daughters of families that have adjacent cemetery plots. This book is part exploration of the class system of the Victorian Era, and part silent song of prepressed sexuality. Honestly, just writing this makes me want to take off my pants!!

Anne Rice- really, I can’t specifically tell you which of her books made me think that she needed to be on this list but, she needed to be on the list. Perhaps it is because I read the Lestat books when I was 17 and 18, and then all of the Sleeping Beauty reimagining’s, but I find Anne Rice’s language to be lurid, and enveloping, like the scent of a decaying orchid. Reading her work, you feel the energy of a night in New Orleans, you can almost feel the cemeteries calling out to you to make bad decisions. The graves call to you to leave offerings, light candles, leave memories. I love it.

V.C Andrews – this is for her, the original, and all the ghost writers since. Thank you who ever you all are, for making the weird girls all have unexplainable feelings, feelings best expressed, by sex in a cemetery!!

Hit me up on my author page on facebook @JenniferAnneGordonAuthor and let me know what books or authors have made you want to have sex in a cemetery!! I will be interested in reading them.

I will leave you with a short list of the things that are inspiring me today.

Sculptures that capture the softness of fabric even when it is carved out of stone

The way that jagged rocks can feel like hands under water if you touch them.

The way a bird’s back feels when you run your finger down it.

Echoes down empty hallways.

The milky color of the sky in the early morning.