The Hotel Avalon

Thurston, Nicole Renee (2023) The Hotel Avalon. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

The Hotel Avalon is a murder mystery novel about a college dropout in her early twenties who struggles with depression due to ongoing grief about the suicide death of her father. She had gone to college in England for chemistry and forensic science, but never finished due to the trauma of her father’s death, and now works as a mortuary assistant in Rhode Island. One day at work, close to the anniversary of her father’s death, a body comes in who died in the exact same location as he did, compelling her to go visit the site—a coastal hotel where her family used to vacation. There she makes connections with hotel foodservice employees, sets out to prove her father didn’t die by suicide, and uncovers the truth. Physical location and the land’s geography are critical to both plot and aesthetics. The hotel sits on some of Rhode Island’s natural wetlands, a boggy area filled with wild cranberries, sphagnum mats, and reedy pools of water that can be dangerous to the unsuspecting—as both her father and the present-day body, Sam Lexington, learned by drowning in the bog. In this way, the novel has some “Cli-Fi,” or climate fiction, sensibilities. This novel originated during an MFA class, ENG 531 – Climate Science Writing. With a very open-ended prompt to “choose a soil” and create some sort of writing project out of academic research into my chosen soil, I chose peat and ended up writing the first chapter of a noir-ish detective novel centering on the spooky vibes of a peat bog. I set out on a journey over the next two years to turn the class project into a full-length mystery novel. Much of the climate and sustainability elements of my courses in the MFA shaped this work. I eventually created an outline based on a 7-act story structure, identifying the main plot points and character arcs I wanted to weave together, and now have over a hundred pages. Work remains to be done on rewriting certain scenes and adding in many more, as much of the current draft is skeletal, focusing chiefly on the pivotal plot scenes. Probably about half of the draft has been workshopped at various times by MFA classmates. My piece is in conversation with mystery old and new. Older reference works include the Sherlock Holmes canon, particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as noir classics by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Contemporary influences include Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, The Resemblance by Lauren Nossett, The Guest List and The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley, The Maidens by Alex Michaelides, The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood, If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio, and the works of Neil Gaiman. Donna Tartt has been particularly influential for me through her introspective novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. Visual media references include series “Only Murders in the Building,” “Outer Banks,” “In the Dark,” and “Dead to Me,” along with films “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Death on the Nile,” “Knives Out,” “The Big Lebowski,” and the Hitchcock canon. What many of the contemporary novels listed have in common with my own philosophy and desires as a writer is the emerging aesthetic/subgenre of “dark academia,” which encompasses stories, usually set on a school campus, that deal with murder and the human condition, digging into class and elitism. Though Avalon is not set on a school campus, it does have nods to that, as Julian often reflects on her own time in college, and her father was a professor at Brown University. Also, I anticipate that in a future novel, she would be “going back to school.” For this first novel, my own life experiences in hospitality informed my choice of setting, and the idea of “work” and jobs is a central theme. Other prominent themes are family relationships, alcohol abuse, mental health, and the intersections therein.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Bog fiction; Cli-fi; Detective novel; Fiction; Murder mystery; Neo-noir
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	29 Jul 2026 20:26
Last Modified:	29 Jul 2026 20:26
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6329

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