The Way Inn

by Will Wiles

Up in the Air meets Inception in this smart, innovative, genre-synthesizing novel from the acclaimed author of Care of Wooden Floors—hailed as “Fawlty Towers crossed with Freud,” by the Daily Telegraph—that takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee, and the free wifi, and twists them into a surrealistic nightmare of infinite proportions.

Neil Double is a “conference surrogate,” hired by his clients to attend industry conferences so that they don’t have to. It’s a life of budget travel, cheap suits, and out-of-town exhibition centers—a kind of paradise for Neil, who has reconstructed his incognito professional life into a toxic and selfish personal philosophy. But his latest job, at a conference of conference organizers, will radically transform him and everything he believes as it unexpectedly draws him into a bizarre and speculative mystery.

In a brand new Way Inn—a global chain of identikit mid-budget motels—in an airport hinterland, he meets a woman he has seen before in strange and unsettling circumstances. She hints at an astonishing truth about this mundane world filled with fake smiles and piped muzak. But before Neil can learn more, she vanishes. Intrigued, he tries to find her—a search that will lead him down the rabbit hole, into an eerily familiar place where he will discover a dark and disturbing secret about the Way Inn. Caught on a metaphysical Mobius strip, Neil discovers that there may be no way out.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Humor, Paranormal, Contemporary

352 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 2014

About the author

Also writes as W.P. Wiles

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

People often choose a hotel room as the place to end their life. Did you know that? It’s a consideration in the design of the light fitting, and some of the other aspects of the room, although not one we’d admit to. Maybe they do it because they know the body will be found, it won’t rot undiscovered in a one-bedroom Docklands flat. So the hotel becomes an ante-chamber of the morgue.

welcome to the way inn.

this book is presented as a high-concept, slipstreamy bit of fun: like the house in House of Leaves, this one's got a hotel bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, there's a half-finished bridge leading nowhere, a mysterious woman who disappears and reappears at unexpected times, some bending of the laws of physics, and a lot of wry playfulness in its premise and puns.

neil double is our antihero. he works as a conference surrogate - an ingenious concept where his company sends him out to attend conferences so that their customers can get all the benefits of attendance without actually having to go though the hassle and tedium of being there themselves. neil grabs the tote bags and pamphlets, takes notes on the panels and presentations, and makes the first steps towards networking and business card exchange while his clients never need to leave the comfort of their own homes.

and neil loves his job, especially the part where he gets to stay in hotels all the time.

Of course I still have to deal with the rigmarole of actual attendance, but the difference is that I love it . . . I love to float in that world, unidentified, working to my own agenda. And out of all those generalities I love hotels the most: their discretion, their solicitude, their sense of insulation and isolation. The global hotel chains are the archipelago I call home. People say that they are lonely places, but for me that simply means that they are places where only my needs are important, and that my comfort is the highest achievement our technological civilisation can aspire to.

neil is well-suited for hotel life. the allure of the hotel was imprinted on him at a young age, and he has retained his appreciation of the arrangement, with its inherent possibility of fleeting and superficial encounters, and all the trappings of the conference and hotel scene: the gentling muzak, room service and maids who provide an extended childish freedom from having to cook or clean, conference nametags to remind him of the names of people he has slept with at previous conferences, the way that everything is disposable or replaceable. oh, and the showers.

neil goes through life like a tumbleweed, sexually casual/careless and misogynistic, cynically opportunistic, never getting too close to people - just passing though. by choosing to inhabit the controlled sameness of hotels, he begins to blandly blend in, which is perfect for his job, but doesn't make him a very dynamic character. he exists in the between-time, waiting patiently and passively for his next move.

The cause of this sort of hold-up was rarely made clear, it was just more non-time, non-life, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.

(NB - this is a british novelist, so "pot plants" does not refer to that kind of pot. stop being teenagers, americans. unless you are teenagers, in which case - carry on)

neil's favorite hotel chain is the way inn, which is comforting in its ubiquitous meeting of expectations; its prefab and temporary banality. at the start of the novel, he is attending the ultimate conference called meetex, which is a conference about conferences for conference organizers, and staying in a brand new way inn, which from the start, is less pleasurable than what he is accustomed to.

The tube lights flickered and stuttered - an item on a contractor's to-do list, one of the hundreds of glitches that infest new buildings. Plasma rolled in the tubes. Sometimes it's new buildings that have ghosts, not old ones; new buildings are not yet obedient. New buildings are not yet ready for us.

the metacentre, where the conference is being held, is also brand new, and the pedestrian bridge that will one day connect the hotel directly to the space is unfinished - extending outward from each building with an empty gap between. from the first day of the conference, neil runs into unprecedented difficulties, many of them seemingly mundane - difficulty navigating the hotel corridors, a malfunctioning clock radio, a glitch in his keycard. but then everything gets worse. neil's job, hell - his whole life, depends upon anonymity. he is just there to be the "double," to pretend to be someone he is not. but suddenly things start to unravel for him, he is exposed and ostracized, and this conference becomes a surreal, kafkaesque nightmare. which is probably redundant, but whatever.

neil finds himself drawn into a claustrophobic psychological adventure, in which he will discover the sinister flipside to comfort and convenience, the small horrors in ordinary things, he will learn how so much depends upon a bus pass, and will eventually uncover a conspiracy that shatters his entire conception of the hotel as place of comfort and soothing expectation.

and it all comes down to a woman.

neil considers himself to be a scholar of hotels, aware of all of the small details and contrivances that make them effective

The lift doors were flanked by narrow full-length mirrors. Vanity mirrors, installed so people spend absent minutes checking their hair and don't become impatient before the lift arrives. Mirrors designed to eat up time... A small sofa sat in the corridor near the lift, one of those baffling gestures towards domesticity made by hotels. It was not there to be sat in – it was there to make the corridor appear furnished, an insurance policy against bleakness and emptiness.

but then he meets a woman who knows even more than he does; a woman he has seen before - a different time, a different way inn.

they perform the necessary glib banter of the hotel bar:

'I'm sure I would have concluded by saying hello,' I said. 'You know, when you're in a hotel, unlikely to see a person ever again, where's the harm?'

'Yeah, I've noticed guys are less inhibited about striking up conversation in a hotel bar. Guys in general. In hotels in general. I've always assumed there was some slow-witted male equation at work. Unaccompanied woman in hotel bar equals prostitute. Or slut, anyway.'

This remark didn't seem to be pointed at me, so I smiled in response. 'Could be. For some men.'

She shrugged. 'It's a building that also contains beds. Maybe that confuses them. They think, well, this woman is already sleeping somewhere in this building, surely it won't make a difference to her what bed she's in or who's there with her.'

'I think it might be related to my anthropological conclusions,' I said. 'Where's the harm? There's less danger of lasting social embarrassment from saying hello to a stranger in a hotel bar, because if it turns out badly you can go and hide in your room and the next day you both check out and that's that. It's a completely disposable moment. And prostitution promises a similar deal, in its way - it's completely disposable sex, no lasting traces, no aftermath.

and although She was wise to the way hotels put sex on the brain, posing themselves as convenient selection boxes of beds and genitals, she eventually overcomes her dismissal of his advances and shows him what the hotel really is.

and then things get crazy.

and despite all the crazy, the problem with writing a book about how soul-sucking the travel experience is, even if the narrator doesn't find it so, is that the reader has to experience it at the same time as the character. i will say wiles does a really good job in these long beige descriptive passages of endless hotel corridors and the superficial bonhomie of the conference experience, and he really brings that weary feeling to the reader, but after a while, it's just … soul-sucking.

there are so many hallways.

it's a little crazy at the end, and i don't think it ever lives up to its potential for true scariness, but it's mostly fun and engaging, and a really fast read, once you get through all those hallways. and if you have ever been to a conference or stayed in a hotel, it will definitely make you think.

3.5 stars.

come to my blog!

[Jack Tripper · Rating 3 out of 5]

What starts out as a humorous and witty --yet pretty mundane -- story, filled with wry observations about the business traveler's life, soon turns into a surrealistic nightmare when Neil discovers that the hotel he's staying in may not be quite what it seems. The mystery of the hotel is intriguing enough to carry the reader through the several chapters where seemingly nothing much is happening, because it's clear that there are David Lynch/Philip K. Dick levels of weirdness underneath the surface, and the fun comes from trying to figure out just what the heck is going on. This is definitely a book you want to read in a short span -- say a week or less -- in order to maintain the eerie, unsettling mood. It very nearly lost me a couple of times early on, with pages and pages of nothing more than observations about hotels and hotel life in general (though they were all generally amusing), but once the insanity and horror kicks into high gear, there's really no going back if you're a fan of reality-bending fiction.

3.0 Stars

[Aditi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Physical illusions are phenomenal illusions which occur before light enters the eye, such as a mirage, a rainbow... Physiological illusions are the effects on the eyes or brain of prolonged stimulation of a specific type: brightness, tilt, color, movement... Visual cognitive illusions interact with different levels of perceptual processing, and inbuilt assumptions or ‘knowledge’ becomes misdirected. When we experience a visual cognitive illusion, the perceptual error remains compelling even when we are fully aware of its nature.

Now that's the definition of Optical Illusion- all about light, mind and eyes! A trick played over and over again, but unfortunately our brain fails to register it!

Will Wiles, an architecture as well as an author, has mastered his architectural skills to build his massive and grand chain of hospitality hotels in his new book, called The Way Inn. Also he managed to create a quite a deal of visual perception on his reader's minds via his protagonist, Neil Double.

Thanks to the author, Will Wiles, for providing me with a review copy, in return for an honest review.

A man named Neil Double works as a conference surrogate, a.k.a, conference pirate (in a bad way!), whose job is to attend week long or weekend long conferences in some part of the world on behalf of someone else, and the perks are very good, since he gets to live his life in a chain of superior quality, grand hotels in various cities, and also he never runs out of patent totes and number of pamphlets and leaflets and customized pens and notepads! Most above all, Neil loves attending these conferences like an elite class business man! And he loves the part where he gets to stay in The Way Inn hotels.

This time on this visit, he stumbles upon a mysterious red-headed woman, who introduces herself as a marketing personnel working for the Way Inn chain of hotels. He intrigued her from the very first visit, like an illusion, she invaded his attention and focus.

This time he gets caught by the conference head and is banished from attending any further conferences in his life. He doesn't sit quietly and takes his paws upon that man!

But all this while, it seems to him, every single passing day or rather say in the dead of the night, the hotel is eventually revealing itself to Neil. But that's a mystery! And it's left for the readers to peel the layers of it!

I know, the concept sounds intriguing and very brilliant, but it didn't play out well with The Way Inn hotel's mystery and in the end, the story turned out to be a science-fiction one, instead of making us believe with the concept of illusion and kinesis and the storey felt so unreal to me!
The book is divided into three parts- The Conference, The Hotel and The Inner Hotel.
Only Neil, Hilbert, the hotel manager and the red-headed woman are the key characters in the book, which don't leave any mark upon our minds!
Moreover the way the author unfolded Neil's obsession about the hotels and conferences is not that compelling, but frankly speaking, right after the first part, I found real interest on the book and by the end of the second part, I thoroughly got gripped, and by the end of the book, I felt, it's not that great actually!

But still if you want to experience something new and explore the world of illusion, then The Way Inn is a perfect read for you.

For more interest in illusion and kinesis, please visit these sites:
Archimedes' Laboratory

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book really difficult to get through. The story picks up about 2/3s in, but it wasn't enough for me to forgive the never-ending descriptions of every aspect of the hotel setting. Dull plot aside, I hated the protagonist. I knew I was never going to like him when at one point, he chooses not to get room service dessert because it felt "effeminate". I can't get behind a character that doesn't want dessert.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Wiles' first novel, Care of Wooden Floors (2012),* suspended its protagonist in the tragicomic tension of occupying another man's home, so perfectly designed to reflect the personality of its owner (a minimalist composer) that any other person trying to navigate it would be bound — like that protagonist — to chaotic misadventure. Wiles' new novel, The Way Inn , instead takes on a space tailored to no personality, the anonymous hallways and rooms of a corporate chain hotel with locations all over the world, each meant to feel as blandly familiar and welcoming to the corporate road warrior and conference attendee as any other. As those anonymous spaces become imbued with personality, the banal revealing itself to be idiosyncratic and unpredictable, so too The Way Inn becomes a novel between or across genres: the thriller, the haunted house story, the quietly reflective contemporary novel of work.

What intrigues me most is the complicating ambiguity the novel brings by way of these genre elements. Most thrillers, at least in my experience, reach a point of moral clarity — the good vs. the bad — and stories of threatening places ultimately negate the appeal of that place. The Way Inn, however, is honest about the pleasures of such anonymous spaces, that their disorientation can in fact be reorienting, like the shower in protagonist Neil Double's hotel room:

Every day the whole shower is reset by invisible staff, as if you had never been in it. In your shower at home, your repeated visits will eventually accumulate, and you must continually  clean the unit. This, more than the dribbling water or the Swiss watchmaker precision needed to set the temperature between glacial and scalding, is the true disappointment of the home shower: you are constantly encountering yourself.

This stripping away, of experience, of accrued quotidian "filth," and of complication is akin to a past job Double recounts, in which he was responsible for finding cheaper replacements for the high-end building materials clients had actually contracted for, to produce husk versions of the buildings they actually wanted. It's cynical, and destructive, but there's also something appealing about reduction to a banal minimum — perhaps it's a dark way of achieving the simplicity and "presence" Peter Zumthor has championed in architecture.

It's that acknowledgment of the appeal, even as characters struggle against its source (and I'm trying not to give away much of the story unnecessarily) that most engaged me in The Way Inn, both intellectually and through the excitement of its increasingly action-oriented plot. There's a sense here of the thriller as a "proto-genre," something all-accessible and infinitely variable as a hotel space, like a field Double discovers near his hotel in which nothing grows, and where it seems nothing ever has grown or ever will grow, only layers of ahistorical nothing marking a quintessential opposite to natural landscapes (think, in contrast, of the rich layers of local knowledge and history and change over time pulled out of a "mere" field in a novel like Jim Crace's Harvest).

These spaces of Wiles' are horrifying, and cautionary, and yet… and yet they are also deeply appealing, as reader and protagonist are forced to acknowledge together. They are escapism incarnate, these spaces in which we might briefly become a stripped down, simplified version of ourselves — or not so briefly, if the appeal is so great or the career so all-encompassing we come to spend our lives in these spaces. Just as a reader prone to dismissing "less literary" genres like the escapist thriller or haunted house story — and less "significant" spaces like the conference hotel — might come to realize they can be richly complex, as complex and contradictory as our desires to step outside ourselves at times to feel like ourselves more fully.

* As disclosure, I reviewed Care of Wooden Floors for Ploughshares, and have since become friendly with Will Wiles, so these comments should be read in that light — I wouldn't review his new book more formally than on my own blog or here at Goodreads.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird speculative fiction with a Twilight Zone vibe. A sort of House of Leaves, but for the business traveler. This book was alot of fun, especially for someone who has frequently stayed at this type of hotel. The story has a slow build, but really picks up after Dee tells Neil about the hotel. If you're looking for something a bit different, you might want to give this book a try.

[Stacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is absolutely brilliant. It's a dystopian, future-gothic thriller... except guess what? It's in a present day chain hotel, and the descriptive details that come across as lurid technologies of a mind-numbing science fiction are in fact just the technologies we all see in modern hotels and conference rooms. We are already there. Wiles shines a light on the antiseptic and soulless environments of modern-day hotels/offices as he takes his protagonist through a fast-paced supernatural adventure through time and space. You'll never look at the hotel alarm clock the same way again. (Cue "Twilight Zone" theme.")

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books of 2014, The Way Inn is a pure mind-fucking story wrapped in a masterful storytelling. I loved every page that I've spend in the company of its annoying central character and his hallucinatory journey.

[Alex Storer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Way Inn starts off with a humorous and a cynical take on the corporate world. Anybody who has had to endure large corporate events or stay in chain hotels will instantly relate to the finely researched detail here. While some moments had me rolling on the floor with hysterics, the fun doesn’t last long, as the tone gradually shifts when the story’s protagonist Neil Double, slowly comes to realise that nothing is quite as it seems.

Neil Double is a conference surrogate – he travels around attending these big corporate conferences and expos, so you don’t have to. And he’s a loyal member of the Way Inn chain of hotels. His latest conference takes him to a brand new Way Inn. And that's where the fun begins.

Maybe the hotel is not the safe haven Neil always believed it to be. Who makes all those abstract paintings in the hotel rooms? What do they all mean? Why is there another room 219? And who is that girl with the red hair?

The Way Inn is the most original and enjoyable book I’ve read for a while – a sinister and surreal nightmare scenario where Lynch meets Kafka in a Balladrian sort of way. The Way Inn also sits alongside the work of authors such as Christopher Priest or Haruki Murakamki – where if you scratch the surface of mundane everyday life, you’ll find something nasty lurking under the surface. Wiles’ writing style is original, clever, incredibly witty and great fun, making The Way Inn a real page turner. The characters are wonderfully developed and his attention to detail is excellent – an incredibly “visual” read.

Breaking with typical chapter convention, The Way Inn is divided into three distinct parts, as you go deeper and deeper into a disturbing and bizarre nightmare world. We’ve all had those bad dreams where things spiral so far out of control that you don’t think you’ll ever recover normality – well here it is in book form.

I actually bought The Way Inn on the strength of Christopher Priest’s online review, and it certainly lived up to my expectations, and I look forward to reading more of Will Wiles’ work.

And I never want to stay in a chain hotel again.

[Nick Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now that I've finished reading about The Way Inn, an identikit brand of hotels, I know that I never want to go back inside it. But the way this story propels itself from being about a standard business conference, to transforming into a crazy, chaotic netherworld into which we are dropped like goldfish into a bowl, seeing outside the glass and never looking at reality the same way again, is a mind-melding trip you need to hasten yourself into taking. Like, right now.
The best thing is the Way Inn becomes a character itself, as it were, and that the artwork, the halls, the locality is expanded, realigned, and morphed into something more. But don't take my word for it. Enter it, at your own peril, but only if you're daring.
The ending brought things to a place I wanted to go, but I lacked the satisfaction of a kiss between two characters, which I had hoped might happen. At any rate, I was impressed by the power of this book, by the imagery it uses, by the insanely addictive way it lured me in - and as I've said, I never want to re-enter, except maybe to re-read.
This is a dangerously well-written book and I'm so glad that I picked it up. I really had no recommendation, as no one I know has read it. The only sketch I had of its plot before opening the book was provided on the back jacket of a galley I picked up one day at work at the library. From there, I have not been able to put it down, and finishing it was grand! I definitely recommend it.

[Alex Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a surprisingly well-done novel. I'd never heard of the author but he's a very clever writer who created a truly unique, darkly comic vision of the convention-goers life. Nice job, worth a spin. It reminded me of a theory my friends and I developed in high school about 7-Elevens: that there was really only one of them, and when you entered it, you were just going into the one master store that existed in thousands of other places around the world.

[Bookish Haven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have put up a review of this book at my blog: http://ariaalexisrivera.blogspot.com/...

I like Neil Double's character. He is earnest, sincere and has a strong determination to find out the hotel's mystery phenomena.

Also, I enjoyed the author's choice of words and sentence structure at times, which gives a vivid picture of the hotel's unique structure; enough reason for me to never stay in a hotel alone, even for a short stay.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Based on other online reviews I've seen, I can understand why Will Wiles' The Way Inn might not be everyone's cup of tea -- some people might find it a little too silly, others a little too pointless, and both these arguments are fair if you're going into the book determined not to like it. But I, on the other hand, ended up loving it quite a bit, and that's because the book is a successful combination of several different major influences: it's partly like a Douglas Coupland novel (in that it's a highly intelligent sociological breakdown of generic suburban hotel chains, and what their blandness says about us as human beings), partly like a JG Ballard story (in that this blandness is the inspiration for an existential horror story concerning our narrator hero, a professional attendee of corporate conferences who basically freelances his body to other office workers, delivering reports on what they missed and posing as them at such conventions' many meet-and-greet events), and partly like a David Lynch movie (in that this existential horror ends up having a very real science-fictiony explanation behind it, which without going into detail is kind of like a haunted-house story meeting quantum physics), all of which is meshed together in this beautiful way by Wiles so that each of the elements compliments the other, not clashes against them. In fact, there's really only one major criticism to be made of this fast-paced, always interesting book, that several of the scenes near the end suffer from what I call "Clive Barker Syndrome" (that is, on paper such scenes come off as okay, but would look ridiculously cheesy and cartoonish if anyone ever tried actually filming them); but if you can live with a climax that will sometimes make you roll your eyes a bit, the rest of this sharp, insightful novel will be right up the alley of Lost fans and the like, a philosophical look at our modern world that doubles as a pretty effective genre thriller as well.

Out of 10: 9.2, 9.7 for David Lynch fans

[Darlington30 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mild spoilers below.

The premise of The Way Inn sounds promising: a man whose job it is to go to other people's conferences in their stead has an "Inception-like" experience at a chain hotel. Unfortunately, The Way Inn is neither as innovative nor as post-modern as Inception. Instead, what Will Wiles gives us is modern-age existential ennui rehashed into a million metaphors using conferences and chain hotels. The hook of the novel--that the hotel harbors some space-time enhancing properties appears well into the second half of the novel by which time we have heard the main character smugly pronounce how life is endless repetition--wait for it--just like a chain hotel. The adventure itself, once it gets moving, is also rehashed from modern adventure tropes--man is part of machine, man meets beautiful and mysterious woman who leads him on an adventure of self discovery, man must choose between material comfort and being "free". You can guess what the man chooses. There was so much potential here for Wiles to take a sharp turn, and give us something fresh and original. But like the hotels he so criticizes, this one ends up looking like all the rest.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who has been to quite a few conferences (not as an exhibitor, just as an attendee or presenter), there is something to the idea of a conference surrogate that's just... intriguing. Seriously intriguing. Of course, to use a service like that would be wrong. But... well... And the bland sameness of chain hotel rooms is something with which I'm familiar, so there's that part of this book I identify with.

Had there been less soliloquizing (if that isn't a word, tough) and fewer descriptive passages, particularly in the last third of the book, it could have been an easy 5 star. But that last third? Sorry. It just needed something - editing? direction? Something, anyway.

ARC provided by publisher.

[Austin Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable and creepy. There's a lot of J.G. Ballard in this, plus some Richard Matheson. The existential crisis is mirrored beautifully by a nightmarish Borges-meets-Lovecraft sort of conceit.

I keep thinking of favorable comparisons. Maybe a little Man Who Was Thursday, a little P.K. Dick. Martin Amis? Worth reading if you enjoy enjoyable novels.

[Sara Saab · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great speculative conceit yoked into forced banality by a pervasive and extreme middle-aged-English-guy-ness about the whole endeavour.

[Rae · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had potential: a professional conference goer gets tangled up in a corporate-House-of-Leaves-esque situation. It starts slow, but with hints of the freakiness to come.

Despite the MC inspiring feelings of intense dislike in me by voicing his opinions on the interchangeability of women, I still got drawn in. The subtle creep factor worked for me, and I wanted to see what was about to unravel.

Sadly, I found the final third got dull very quickly despite containing the bulk of the action. Last night, I fell asleep with about 5 pages remaining, which pretty much says all I need to say about the climax.

With its sexist ass of an MC & uninspired ending, I can't go higher than 3 stars.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I dislike re-hashing plots, I'm lucky here that doing so would be kind of difficult. I will say up front that structurally the book reminded me of the Gone Girl experience, where the first half was (pretty much) set up - like the uphill climb on a roller coaster - dealing with Neil's life as a "conference surrogate" for companies who don't wish to send an actual employee to represent them. So, it seems more a picture (parody?) of the life of a Road Warrior.

The roller coaster reaches the top as Neil faces a crisis, threatening the surrogate career he's established, which he deals with by re-grouping back at the hotel, brainstorming for ideas ... and down the tracks he (and we) go. From then on, the story takes on a Murakami-like fantasy world tone, with some Kafka-esque doom-and-gloom to ratchet up the tension.

So, you're likely wanting to know: does that work, and should I read this? Yes. Bear in mind that in the first part, Neil came across to me as rather a prick - a drink thrown in his face wasn't altogether unwarranted. In a well done book, characters change (grow), which he does by the last page. The second part did drag slightly for me with a flashback to Neil's childhood, but nothing serious.

Part, if not all, of the fourth star has to do with the great narrator fit here. I felt he brought the description of the surroundings alive, as well as voicing the villain well (you'll know him when he appears, Satan-like, to tempt Neil in his moment of crisis). I will say the fight scenes had a Batman-like BIFF! BAM! ZAP! quality to them (grin).

Anyway ... if you've been reading a lot of nonfiction, or "standard" novels, and you're looking for something to change things up a bit, consider this one.

[Scarlett Sims · Rating 4 out of 5]

The description for this says it's Up in the Air meets Inception; I would add to that late-era David Foster Wallace and a pinch of Franz Kafka. It took me longer than usual to read it, but not because it wasn't good. Really I think it's because it wasn't really divided into chapters... I feel like chapter breaks help me read faster.

Anyway, if you like a sort of banal setting with something more sinister beneath the surface, that's what this is. I'm also definitely interested in reading other things Wiles has written.

[Ian Mond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science Fiction conventions aside, I’ve been to my fair share of industry conferences. The one’s I’ve attended have generally been held in Melbourne and so I haven’t needed accommodation. But on the rare occasion I’ve had to travel interstate, I’ve found staying in a barely adequate hotel – the public service doesn’t shell out for five-star comfort – coupled with attending a conference that could redefine our very understanding of boredom, as a less than satisfactory experience.

Which is why the first half of The Way Inn resonated with me, especially Wiles description of the conference scene as an abattoir and the attendees sheep heading for the slaughter.

Ahead of us, and already around us, were the exhibitors, in their hundreds, waiting for all those eyes and credentials and job titles to sluice past them. There is the expectant first-day sense that business must be transacted, contacts must be forged, advantages must be gleaned, trends must be identified, value must be added, the whole enterprise must be made worthwhile. Everyone is at the point where investment has ceased and the benefits must accrue. A shared hunger, now within reach of the means of fulfillment. Like religion, but better; provable, practical, purposeful, profitable.

Neil Double, our slightly douche protagonist, is aware that this almost religious euphoria, this “shared hunger” ultimately wears off. What remains is just another dull conference where you spend your time sitting through mind numbing panels about OH&S reform and make small talk with people whose names you’ve forgotten but who you vaguely recognise from the last trade conference you attended. It’s this overwhelming sense of ennui that Neil takes advantage of. As a conference surrogate his job is to attend these trade fairs on your behalf, taking copious notes at each panel so you’re provided with the content minus the ratty hotel or getting drunk at another sponsored dinner.

And Neil absolutely loves his job, viewing it as what he was born to do. Part of it comes from the “pervasive anonymity” and the ability to “float in that world [of trade conferences] unidentified working to my own agenda,” but mostly it’s the hotel experience that provides true job satisfaction. Specifically, Neil’s love for hotels and motels stem from:

their discretion, their solicitude, their sense of insulation and isolation. The global hotel chains are the archipelago I call home. People say that they are lonely places, but for me that simply means that they are places where my needs only are important, and that my comfort is the highest achievement our technological civilization can aspire to.

It’s this very bubble of comfort and anonymity that’s about to be popped. First off, one of the organisers of the trade fair Neil is attending tricks him into revealing what he does for a living and then calls Neil out during a panel presentation. Following this embarrassing moment, Neil is no longer allowed to attend the conference. So not only is he no longer anonymous, but he can’t do his job.

And second off the Way Inn starts to turn on him. Most of this is wrapped up in Neil’s reunion with a woman who he last saw at a Way Inn motel in Qatar. The thing is… well I’ll let Neil explain what happened:

She walked in and… Well, she wasn’t wearing anything. She just stood there, completely naked, eyes wide, like she was standing to attention. She didn’t say a word at first, but within about ten or twenty seconds everyone in that lobby was looking at her. Total silence. I have never heard anything like it. And then the staff at the front desk went crazy. They started shouting at her, running about, trying to find something to cover her up. Obviously Qatar’s an Islamic country, very conservative—I mean, there would have been a commotion anywhere.

Neil second meeting with this woman, the night before the conference, involves a strange conversation about the banal art that adorns the walls of the Way Inn. Neil spends the first quarter of the novel hoping he’ll bump into her again, but it’s only when he’s kicked out of the conference that he finds himself caught up in the woman’s ongoing battle with the management of the Way Inn.

Dee, for that is her name, is a great character. Neil objectifies her from the get go, describing “her Amazonian height, and her pale skin and red hair” as “not quite match[ing] up to reality, as if she was too high-definition.” But what I enjoyed is how Dee constantly reminds Neil that their partnership is not going to end in sex.

The look on her face was grim. “Do you remember our little talk? About fucking? About how it’s not going to happen?”
“Listen—”
“That is not where this is going. My problems”—she widened her eyes at the thought of those problems, and I wondered what they could be—“are not going to be solved by your penis. Just back off.”

I also liked how Dee is the one who know’s exactly what’s going on with the Way Inn, who understands the dangers posed by the hotel management. It’s Neil own insecurities and weaknesses that ends up getting them both into trouble.

And what trouble would that be? Well, through Dee we discover that the Way Inn – or the entity controlling it – has a found a way of using motels as a means to extrude and impress itself on our reality. So each motel in the chain forms a network, a body that’s constantly growing as each new Way Inn is built. This is a fantastic idea and at least for the first two thirds of the book Wiles makes the most of it by having Neil note small changes in geography, rooms and corridors reconfiguring, and even travelling with Dee between different nodes – moving from one Way Inn to the next.

It’s a shame, then, that Wiles feels a need to introduce a villain about halfway through the book. Having now finished the Southern Reach series by Jeff VanderMeer I know that the creepy and scary can be maintained without the need for a meglomaniac with an evil plan. And yet, as noted above, Dee is battling against the hotel management, personified by Hilbert. He reads like a character who’s walked directly out of a Stephen King novel – I’m thinking Leland Gaunt in Needful Things or even Randall Flagg from The Stand – a Faustian figure who is well spoken and erudite and yet doesn’t entirely fit into his own skin. He’s pithy and dangerous and predictable. As a result the last third of the novel goes from creepy hotel reconfiguring reality to a dull and predictable battle between Neil, Dee and Hilbert whose over the top villainy sucks all the scares out of the novel.

Still, while the last third might be disappointing, it didn’t entirely undermine my enjoyment of the book. That first half in particular is both laugh out loud funny – there’s a love note to the hotel shower that had me in tears – and genuinely unsettling as the true nature of the Way Inn begins to reveal itself to Neil. If I wasn’t spending the next who knows how long reading award shortlists then Wiles would be an author I’d be actively following.

[Mollie]

This book was kind of like, made for me. It had all those things I love: a multidimensional building vaguely reminiscent of House of Leaves, cutting observations about the soullessness and meaninglessness of our modern corporatocracy, a casual but apt reference to Lord of the Rings. But I read it all in one sitting, on a torturous fifteen-hour flight, and I remember the book now like it was a dream I had. How can one rate their own dreams? I don’t remember if it all “came together” or not, but I probably enjoyed this one.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildly weird and surreal, and highly relatable from my business travel experiences. The pacing and language definitely masters the bland corporate communication patterns, making this likely not for everyone, but if you've ever enjoyed reading marketing lit in a meta kind of way and spend too many late nights in a hotel bar with people that you can never quite remember their names you'll find enjoyment here.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super weird. But I liked it. I liked the commentary on the modern world and the spread of budget travel monoculture, and how that's personified in the hotel. Plus the hotel is fucking weird.

Part of the reason I like travel matches up with why Neil likes it, and that made for an interesting exploration as well. Fun stuff.

[Julie Locascio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tried to start skimming paragraphs and skipping ahead, but I finally abandoned it about halfway through. The protagonist is just a self-centered parasite, really, who is not even slightly interesting except that there is a mysterious red-headed woman and hints of a sci-fi adventure, which, I gather from other reviews, does not actually begin until the second half (half!) of the book. In the meantime, you get, ad nauseum, repetitive explanations of bland, bland, bland details about chain hotels and mega conferences. If you read the author's bio, you understand he has a professional career writing about architecture, and apparently he decided to write half a book about bland repetitive hotel and conference center architecture as some sort of metaphor about modern existence, then turn it into a sci-fi thing MUCH later in the book. I have no idea how so many reviewers got through the tedious first half and uninspiring characters on merely the premise that this red-headed woman was somehow the key to more interesting things happening later in the book, but I did not. If you are still interested, I would recommend reading the first 30 pages, then skipping to the second half of the book before you get sick to death of the protagonist.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I sometimes stumble upon which seems calculated to appeal to my sensibilities. Had somebody walked up to me in the street and handed me a copy, telling me only that it's a deeply weird black comedy set in a hyperreal hotel featuring distortions both spatial and psychological, I probably would have clutched the volume to my breast and marched briskly in the other direction before they could take it away from me. This is very much the kind of thing I like. And I would have been further pleased to discover that the book owes much to the spirit of J. G. Ballard, perhaps my favourite British novelist of recent years, who is described in the acknowledgements as nothing less than ‘the greatest writer of the twenty-first century’. You'll not find me arguing against that.

It shares with Ballard’s later novels the preoccupation with the functional interzones of modern times; places such as chain hotels, airport lounges and shopping malls, locations which seem to posses a very distinct and potent ambience. Even as they are designed to feel entirely generic and indistinguishable, the sense of the uncanny often becomes overwhelming in such locales, especially when the visitor turns resident. The Way Inn of the title is merely one of a global chain, an upmarket business class establishment like a Novotel or Radisson designed to cater for the compartmentalised and largely unremarkable bodily needs of thousands of entirely generic people.

Here, the novel’s protagonist is Neil Double, a man whose job it is to stay in places like this while attending conferences all over the world as a kind of surrogate delegate. His clients want the prestige of turning up without the hassle of spending several nights in another featureless hotel, so they get him to attend and write up reports on their behalf. Except that this time, the conference organisers catch on to his game, and unceremoniously kick him out of the event. But before he can leave, he is compelled to pursue a mystery that finds its emblem in a mysterious red-haired woman, and which leads him to the heart of the hotel itself.

There’s a certain stylistic quality for which I’m attracted to novels like this — it’s the same thing which always fascinated me with Ballard — and in this regard the author delivers in spades. It’s intensely dry, wholly disaffected. It’s that uncanny sense of atmosphere, a controlled paranoia that lies on the verge of horror without being outright horrific. The feeling that something awful is about to occur even in the most banal environs conceivable. The suggestion that even something as innocuous as a florescent light fitting might contain a calculated gesture intended to provoke a violent reaction. The notion of a corridor which might never end because to walk it would only be to venture deeper inside the self.

All of this is expressed very well. Apparently the author is an architecture and design journalist, and I can only surmise that his experience in those areas lent itself to his fine eye for detail here. But I’m not entirely sure the book works so well as a novel. As a formal vehicle for the delivery of what I’ve described above, the book seems uncertain as to whether it wants to be a nouveau roman or simply a thriller. Neil Double is set up as a kind of deliberately vacuous avatar for the global business community, but this intriguing aspect is never really developed, and instead he simply becomes the ordinary reluctant hero in a way that becomes rather predictable.

The plot would have made for a fine short story, but the demands of fleshing it out into a novel seem to have ironed out so many of the ambiguities which I usually find so delicious in a book such as this. It's overly long, and the pace is uncertain; it takes a while for the story to get going, but by the time the action starts it rarely lets up, and there’s so much running about in the later pages that I was kept thinking it would make for a rather good ‘Doctor Who’ episode. I don’t write that to belittle — I enjoyed this book a great deal — only to suggest that in terms of tone, the later parts felt like a very different kind of thing to the early sequences. But then it is hard to sustain a sense of profound mystery over the course of a complete plot, and I find that very few works manage this successfully.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Way Inn, is a strange book, yet in some ways very entertaining. Neil Double’s job is a “conference surrogate,” someone hired companies to attend trade shows and conferences in their place. It’s all done on the cheap – cheap travel, cheap accommodations, but hey he makes a living.

For a fee, Neil does what many professionals hate doing. Schmoozing, attending presentations and meeting and living out of a suitcase. He has plenty of work, and he’s a rare bird who enjoys staying in hotels. Up to this point "The Way Inn” is a chain of budget-friendly hotels that makes his travel experience enjoyable. Every room from pictures on the way, placement of furniture, position of toiletries is exactly the same. As a travel bonus he often meets desirable women who seem to enjoy a one-night stand here and there. Life is good and Neil finds comfort in predictable.

Yet for Neil, his latest assignment – a conference for conference organizers is about to change him in unexpected ways. When he meets Dee, a mysterious and elusive red-headed woman at the bar, she tells Neil that she is photographing every single picture hanging on the walls of the hotel, and in the blink of then eye she is gone. Once Neil’s cover as “surrogate” is blown, he’s banned from further conferences and his access cards voided. Neil’s hotel experience this time will be more like a mouse trying to escape an elaborate maze.

I am not sure what to make of this book, and while I loved the author’s first book, The Care of Wooden Floors, this book left me perplexed. The book is divided into three parts: The Conference; The Hotel and The Inner Hotel. There are only three characters to speak of in this novel - Neil, Dee, the red-head, and the hotel manager. None of the characters left an impression. While there is some humor to be had and even elements of tension and fear at times, I never felt invested in the story. To me for the most part if felt like a confusing romp down the rabbit hole. I often felt like I was watching an episode of the Twilight Zone (although those segments I generally get).

2.5/5 stars

[Tintenwelten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neil liebt an Hotels die Anonymität, Austauschbarkeit und dass man sich vorstellen kann, sie wären an jedem beliebigen Ort auf der Welt. Grade diese Anonymität und die Fähigkeit in der Masse zu verschwinden, nicht aufzufallen, ist für seinen Job als Werbevertreter äußerst wichtig. Als er eines Tages an der Hotelbar die faszinierende Dee trifft, begibt er sich auf der Suche nach ihr immer weiter in die labyrinthischen Flure des Hotels und gerät in die Fänge eines scheinbar nie endenden Albtraums.

Das Buch ist eine Kombination aus Horror, Thriller, Spannung, Komik und intelligenten Metaphern. Obwohl der erste Teil des Buches und Neils Beschreibungen des Hotels und Hotelalltags sowie dem Messegeschehen auf mich eher langweilig und langatmig wirkten, entspinnt sich im zweiten Teil eine Geschichte, die sehr mysteriös, bedrückend und bedrohlich war. Der Leser begleitet Neil durch die verwirrenden und beängstigen Flure und Zimmer des Hotels und deckt nach und nach geheimnisvolle Vorgänge auf. Er verstrickt sich immer weiter in Probleme und seltsame Ereignisse häufen sich. Spannung und Nervenkitzel werden hier sehr groß geschrieben. Als Leser fiebert man mit und hadert mit der Irrwitzigkeit und Ausweglosigkeit der Situationen, denen Neil ausgeliefert ist.

Man kann sich sehr gut in Neil hineinversetzen. Durch den Schreibstil wird seine Verwirrtheit und Angst deutlich. Dadurch, dass es in dem Buch im Grunde nur zwei Protagonisten gibt – Neil und später auch Dee – zeigt sich die Abgeschiedenheit und Isolation, in der sie sich befinden, weil ihnen Dinge auffallen, die anderen Menschen verborgen bleiben. Die drohende Gefahr ist allgegenwärtig und die kreierte Atmosphäre kommt sehr authentisch rüber.

Alles in allem beinhaltet das Buch eine wirklich skurrile Idee, spannend verpackt in einem Kaleidoskop an verwirrenden und kaum zu glaubenden Ereignissen.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone make this into a film! It'd make an amazing film I reckon. He's got a good way with words and obviously enjoys language but maybe enjoys looking even more. Coming from an architecture and design journalist, it's a very visual book (the focus on design and architecture was my favourite thing about it). And it all gets fairly explosive and quippy towards the end in a Blockbustery manner.

Genuine lols to be had

He's got that thing going on that it seems mostly men get (eg. Kafka, Ishiguro, Terry Gilliam, Pynchon, De Lillo..) where they feel like the world's out to get them and this is expressed in their interactions with the environment around them. (I can't think of any women who make work like this right now?) Similarly to in dreams, landscapes in the work of these guys seem to be out to make life really difficult for their characters. Walls in the way. Doors that go nowhere. It's all very frustrating. Anyway, Wiles has that aesthetic going on too. Similarly to those other writers / film-maker, this is a bit of a paranoid, psychological freak out as well. But funny!

Could've been shorter?

[hitchhiker42 · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book suffers from poor editing. Nothing really happens for the first 100 pages and I believe it should be cut way down from its 337 pages. Much of Part One is devoted to describing the bland interior of an airport hotel. The author doesn’t seem to understand that plot is a verb. Something needs to happen or the reader will get bored. There are some mildly interesting science fiction elements to the story but by the time you get to them it’s difficult to care any more. The evil villain is bland and the ending is cumbersome and forgettable. The story was a good idea but the editors at HarperCollins allow it to go on too long. In a nutshell: This repetitive and dull novel could be distilled into a really cracking short story.