By Matt Spaulding
The Cut by C.J. Dotson is the story of Sadie Miles, who with her young daughter, is escaping an abusive relationship. Having no money and barely any opportunities, Sadie takes a job as a housekeeper for the historic L’Arpin Hotel. With having no current place to live, they also take a room in the hotel. The plot picks up speed the first night as Sadie realizes that strange and terrifying things happen at L’Arpin Hotel. Yet no one seems to notice, or do they?
I’m not going to bury the lead here, I have mixed feelings about this book. It begins very intriguing and intense. The mystery of L’Arpin starts in a way that pulled me in quickly and made me want to know more. Sadie starts out as a character I really was rooting for. Her background as a woman running from a situation that’s dangerous for her, her toddler and her unborn child, she’s someone relatable. Unfortunately she is someone that almost everyone knows in real life.
The problem I personally found as a reader was that Sadie quickly becomes unfairly unbearable (which I hate saying). The signature elements in her character development became repetitive. Some examples of this is that she distrusts everyone, she is overly sure everyone is hiding something from her, is lying and/or pretty much judging her. This is noted with most of her interactions throughout the book. I had to step out of this character that I was struggling to relate to in order to discover that everything noted is actually very true-to-life when it comes to some real people in similar situations. I lost that as I read, in the same way as loosing the forest for the trees.
Parents in horror stories are naturally insufferable. It’s a thought I had multiple times reading this book, and it made me think back on the horror genre in general that feature children. It makes the parents in the story less complex. They fall into the trope where they have just one goal. An understandable goal - to save their kid. True to the genre, it also makes them do some admittedly dumb stuff. In this book, Sadies does all sorts of things that aren’t well thought out, simply because she thinks that maybe something could put her child in danger. This happens before she even really has any concrete proof!
On a lighter note without my critique on kids in horror, the mystery of L’Arpin Hotel offers a pleasant source of fascination. First, Sadie sees someone drowning in a pool that isn’t really there. Then, there are mysterious creatures that appear (not a spoiler, I think it’s pretty obvious from the cove that this an interesting creature feature). To top it all off, the other staff at the hotel seem to surprisingly not know anything. Or rather, the staff seem to not want to acknowledge anything. This awkward mystery is really what carried most of the novel for me.
I’m left constantly considering the big reveal at the end of this book. A reveal that has lasted way past the last page. I’m still not entirely sure what the creatures are or where they even came from. There’s a hint of an explanation, but only just enough to keep me on the edge for more. I like how it teeters on the Lovecraftian “unknowable horror” thing, assuming so.
All in all, I found The Cut tense and mysterious in some places despite being tedious and repetitive in others.