She doesn’t realize how wrong she is, until the night she disappears. Quite the contrary, she somehow finds herself drawn even closer to this spooky motel. Though, in 1982, The Sun Down is relatively new, it’s already had a storied history.Īnd at night, when the lights are low and the outside spookily calm, Viv sees it, too.īraver than most, Viv doesn’t allow these apparitions to scare her away from The Sun Down. A young woman, on her own, without money, in the technology desert that was 1982, the odds were certainly not in her favor.ĭetermined not to go home, she takes a job working overnights at The Sun Down Motel, an ill-conceived highway-side lodging option nestled against the sleepy upstate town of Fell, New York.
It’s not surprising, really, given everything working against her. Though Viv Delaney had her sights set on New York City when she left home, pretty much penniless and entirely without a plan, she only ever made it as far as upstate New York.
Though not set in a sweeping mountain lodge but instead a small, disused highway side motel, it retained all of the creepiness of The Shining and was just as effective in inducing me to sleep with the lights on. That loneliness became one of the themes of the book.So it’s only natural, then, that this novel scared the bejebbies out of me. The idea for The Sun Down Motel came from my love of true crime, ghost stories, Stephen King books, Stranger Things, and Psycho, but the idea’s magic happened when I created the character of Viv and made her just as deeply lonely as I had been, and when I created the other night shift characters. It seemed like a great setup for a scary story.
I was like a rogue satellite that has left orbit. I didn’t meet anyone or date for those two years, I didn’t party with friends, and I didn’t spend holidays with family because I was working the holiday shifts. No one cared that a young woman who couldn’t afford a car had to get to and from work alone in a bad part of town in the middle of the night.įor a long time, I had the itch to write a ghost story about people who work at night. I was the new kid on the job, I had no husband or children, and I had nowhere else to be, so I was given the shifts no one else wanted. In my early twenties, I worked night shifts at a now-defunct TV station for almost two years.
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