The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

The person who could be truly alone, in the company of no one but oneself and one’s own thoughts—that person was stronger than anyone else. More ready. More prepared.

In my early twenties, I worked night shifts at a now-defunct TV station for almost two years. 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. 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. For a long time, I had the itch to write a ghost story about people who work at night. 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. I was like a rogue satellite that has left orbit. It seemed like a great setup for a scary story. 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. That loneliness became one of the themes of the book. And it has resonated with so many readers!

How it didn’t matter how afraid or how careful you were—it could always be you.

This is another theme of the book: that the average woman is, in her own way, an expert in crime. Both Viv and Carly come to realize this fact as they learn to rely on their own instincts, born of always being aware of danger. This is also one of the reasons that the true crime genre is so popular with women, something I could go on and on about! I love true crime, and I really wanted to read a novel that gave me that same thrill while also being a satisfying mystery. I couldn’t find that book, so I wrote it, which is how I come up with most of my ideas.

It was November 29, 1982, 11:24 p.m. By three o’clock in the morning, Viv Delaney had vanished. That was the beginning.

This line is unchanged from my first draft, which is rare! I rewrote the first chapter many, many times, because first chapters are important and you have to get them just right. Anything that doesn’t work in the first chapter, or anywhere else in the book, has to go. But I loved this line when I wrote it, and as I rewrote draft after draft, I kept it in. Having an original sentence make it to the final book is so unusual that I always celebrate it!

Except that once I graduated from reading The Black Stallion, the books I read were the dark kind—about scary things like disappearances and murders, especially the true ones. While other kids read J. K. Rowling, I read Stephen King. While other kids did history reports about the Civil War, I read about Lizzie Borden.

My brother is four years older than me, and at age twelve I started raiding his Stephen King bookshelf. I read things I definitely should not have been reading at far too young an age. I also remember a yellowed paperback called “Women Who Kill” that I picked up at a babysitting job. The Lizzie Borden chapter started my love for true crime.

Because Fell, it turned out, had more than one unsolved murder. For such a small place, it was a true-crime buff’s paradise.

I wanted to make Fell, my fictional town, almost a character in the book. I wanted readers to feel like they were taking a temporary trip to a place that was weird and creepy and a little surreal. I always set my books in fictional towns if possible, because that way I get to make up details instead of wasting time researching things I will probably get wrong!

For the first time in her life, it occurred to her how erasable she was.

I had this thought often when I worked night shifts. I used to wonder how long it would take someone to figure out I was gone if I vanished. This reflects Viv’s state of mind, how disconnected from her own life she feels at this moment. I wanted it to be believable that Viv would take the job at the Sun Down, because she doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere at all.

“This place is dark.” “Some of us like the dark. It’s what we know.”

Heather was supposed to be a very minor character, a background person who showed up in a couple of scenes. From the first moment she appeared on the page, I knew she was going to be something more. She is Carly’s friend, but she also has her own struggles. In a lot of thrillers, the roommate is a character who gets murdered to further the plot. I thought, what if the roommate doesn’t get killed? What if she’s actually really cool? That was Heather.

“Cathy Caldwell was killed in December 1980,” Viv said. “She was twenty-one. She worked as a receptionist at a dental office. She was married and had a six-month-old son. Her husband was deployed in the military.”

I’m a true crime lover, but I didn’t base the murders in Fell on any real-life cases. That was intentional. Instead I made them an echo of the cases we’ve heard so many times, over and over again, so often that the details blend. I offset that feeling of sameness with Viv’s call to Cathy’s mother, which I think is a heartwrenching conversation about a woman who was deeply loved.

To Viv, it was all about the woman in the flowered dress. Who, she now knew, was Betty Graham. “Betty was unsolved,” Viv said, pushing her. “Before Cathy. In November of 1978.”

The murders described in the book are bleak, but there is a hopeful side. Both Viv and Carly take up the task of finding justice for the murdered women. Alma and Marnie contribute in their own ways. The victims aren’t forgotten. Someone still cares, years later. Viv and Carly find their courage, confidence, and power in the story. And Betty…Well, she gets her chance at revenge.

Viv turned in a circle, the thoughts going inescapably through her mind: What would I have done? Because this could have been her, storming out of the house at eighteen after a fight with her mother. Or leaving work. Doing what women did every day. It could still be her now. It could be her tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. It could be Marnie, it could be Helen. It could be Viv’s sister back home in Illinois. This was the reality: It wasn’t just these girls. It could always, always be her or someone she knew.

I wanted to make a commentary here about how murder victims are portrayed, especially women. They are always described as bright, happy, kind, generous paragons. It bugs me. Flawed women don’t deserve to get murdered, either. So I made Victoria Lee someone who was more difficult to like, who was fighting with people in her life. She had a fight with her mother and never had a chance to make things right, which ties into the idea that it can be any of us, on any bad day we might be having.

He’ll make a mistake. He’ll come into the light. There will be justice, I swear.”

This is one of my favorite lines in the book. It’s also a nod to Michelle McNamara’s amazing true crime book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which I highly recommend. (I also borrowed Michelle’s name for Janice McNamara.) I have been amazed by the reader response to The Sun Down Motel, and I have a lot more coming that I hope readers enjoy!