Following a botched bank robbery, a group of thieves make a daring escape to get out of the city before they're caught and stop at a remote hotel in the Outback to regroup and reform their strategy. When they arrive, the family working to get the hotel in working order for the upcoming season are taken hostage until they can deal with everything, but when they realize the youngest son is not among the hostages, and he may possess the key to a devastating entity with dangerous supernatural powers, no one is safe from what happens next.
This was a really fun and enjoyable read. The fact that we get two involved, detailed storylines at play here is a great stroke, managing to bring together the robbers trying to get themselves out of their increasingly desperate situation with not just a failed robbery involving the death of several individuals but the fear and panic of trying to keep their wounded friend alive keeps this moving along at a fine pace. The other fine storyline, about the family trying to work their best to get the hotel up and running for the season, sets them up quite nicely to then crash into each other at a generally unexpected time as the escape route puts them in contact with the family and take them hostage.
At this point, the book goes for a secondary dual-pronged storyline where it keeps alternating between one member of the merged group being the lead in the situation, either one of the robbers leading the hostages through their paces helping their wounded friend or the family trying to placate the robbers in their midst. This format of dedicating a specific amount of time to each individual in the situation keeps us in mind of who they are throughout here as the situation unfolds, getting the backstory on each of the characters to understand their motivations, their reasoning for being in the whole affair and sowing the seeds of what's to come with glances, quips, or just plain simplistic actions that make sure everything between the two parties remains smooth.
This forces the growing realization of the true threat within the hotel quite nicely as the hints dropped subtly over the first half take more prominence on the leader the more they stay trapped within the building's confines. As the series of encounters give way to the creeping dread of what's going on with the leader and his unhinged nature, the creature feature action that emerges when the influence over his behavior is revealed leading to a thrilling, high-energy finale where its encounters are used to build to a thrilling finish involving the survivors trying to bring their knowledge of what's happened before to a bloodsoaked conclusion.
This setup does run into two slight factors. The fact that so much of it is devoted to brief snippets during the encounter as a whole has a way of rendering the thrills to incidental spurts of terror where the supernatural being within the house is woken up only incidentally with the majority of the terror here reserved for the robbery leader's violent outbursts and antics that keep the family in danger. The flashbacks that occur telling of the hauntings that took place at the hotel give an exciting indication of what could occur when the being responsible is released, but it happens slowly enough that it takes an unnatural realization as to how those incidents are often ignored in favor of keeping the tension going between the various parties.
Moreover, the book makes such a big deal about the powers the youngest son has, which is given an integral part of the storyline based on the multiple family members that claim to have it, seems to disappear quite readily from the book at points. Due to the parallel storylines taking place around him, the majority of the film is a hostage drama about the robbers holding the family against their will and the occasional glimpse of something dreadful happening on the outskirts of the story with the mysterious entity draining blood from bodies. This leaves the supernatural forces at play within the hotel to be a presence more at the end than anything which is underwhelming. Still, there's not much else to be had holding this one back from being a thoroughly solid read.
4/5