Blog Tour – Horror Hotel

Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today is my stop on the blog tour for Horror Hotel, and I’m pleased to be sharing an interview today with authors Victoria Fulton & Faith McClaren. This tour is being run by the lovely TBR and Beyond, and you can find the tour schedule with blog links here.

Synopsis
This addictive YA horror about a group of teen ghost hunters who spend the night in a haunted LA hotel is The Blair Witch Project for the TikTok generation.
When the YouTube-famous Ghost Gang—Chrissy, Chase, Emma, and Kiki—visit a haunted LA hotel notorious for tragedy to secretly film after dark, they expect it to be just like their previous paranormal huntings. Spooky enough to attract subscribers—and ultimately harmless.

But when they stumble upon something unexpected in the former room of a gruesome serial killer, they quickly realize that they’re in over their heads.

Sometimes, it’s the dead who need our help—and the living we should fear.

Underlined is a line of totally addictive romance, thriller, and horror paperback original titles coming to you fast and furious each month. Enjoy everything you want to read the way you want to read it.

Hi Victoria and Faith, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today about your upcoming release, “Horror Hotel”. Where did your inspiration come from?
We were so excited to mix ghosts with true crime in this novel set at the fictional Hearst Hotel in DTLA. We obviously took some inspiration from the darkly historical Cecil Hotel and the tragic story of Elisa Lam, but we also grew up loving Ghost Hunters and paranormal investigation shows. In fact, we’ve done a little amateur ghost hunting ourselves! We’ve both been on late night ghost tours at the Queen Mary and Victoria once went on an overnight ghost hunt at the haunted West Virginia State Penitentiary.

As for the Ghost Gang’s YouTuber aspirations, Victoria and Faith happen to be two elder millennials who love YouTube and TikTok (especially fail videos and irreverent cats).

This takes a classic horror theme and adds in social media. Do you think this is an essential addition to young adult novels these days?
Essential for a contemporary YA novel, yes. Writing a book for teenagers without social media is like writing a book set in present day with no cars. It better be set in colonial times! Or at least before 1997. 

What do you hope your readers will take away from “Horror Hotel”?
We mostly just hope they have a good time. Cry a little, laugh a little, swoon a little — cower in fear a lot. We know these last few years have been tough, especially for kids and teens, so we hope they find some respite in the spooky shenanigans of the Ghost Gang.

What put you two together as a writing duo? Do you feel you bring out each other’s strengths when working together, or do you drive each other around the bend?!
We started working together thanks to a shared impatience to get our stories to readers. We started out writing a novel on WattPad chapter-by-chapter, which led to a few cool things we can’t talk about yet, which led us to our now-agent Katie Shea-Boutillier, which led us to writing HORROR HOTEL for Underlined.

We definitely bring complementary writing strengths to the table, but no — writing together is very easy. We love collaborating on projects because it’s fun and (mostly) effortless.

How are your own reading habits influenced by what you’re working on?
More likely our writing is influenced by our rabbit hole habits! We both love true crime shows and ghost stories, and our shared love of spooky everything led us to writing HORROR HOTEL. We’re talking Dateline, Ghost Hunters, serial killers, every Netflix true crime documentary, Reddit threads, you name it! There’s even a TV show called “The Dead Files” where a psychic woman tells shivering homeowners that the ghosts haunting their houses are probably going to kill them.

Finally, how would you describe “Horror Hotel” in three words?
Spooky, smoochy, stabby.

Book Links
Good Reads
Amazon US / Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble
Book Depository
Indigo
IndieBound

About The Authors
Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren are an award-winning coauthor duo who write edgy rom-coms and frightening horror with plenty of smooching, friendship and movie references. Originally hailing from Ohio and Texas, respectively, they met in an online writing workshop where their friendship quickly blossomed into a partnership demanding they live in the same state. Now they both work and write in too-sunny Los Angeles, CA. Victoria lives with her fiancé and their two cat children and co-runs a PR agency with her other best friend in her spare time. Faith eats home baked goods made by her husband, raises a wolf-loving son, and wrangles two scruffy dogs, while also working as a book coach and developmental editor, and writing YA and women’s fiction under her real name Rebekah Faubion.

Author Links
Twitter
Instagram
Victoria’s Good Reads
Faith’s Good Reads

Thanks for stopping by for my stop today, and a big thank you to Faith and Victoria for their time answering my questions. Horror Hotel is out now.