When reading The Landlady, I found it very peculiar, and took me a little bit to wrap myself around it. They made the story with next to no explanations, making the reader create their own to try and fit the story.
The book starts off with a travelling man on his way to find a motel. On his way to find the Bell and Dragon, which he was told to be not too far away, he encounters a place for bed and breakfast for an extraordinary cheap price. A woman with very blue eyes opens the door as soon as he rings the doorbell. The man notices some animals resting comfortably around the entrance, a dog by the fire and a parrot in a cage. The man finds the woman strangely familiar, and notices she looks like someone he knew.
The woman is very welcoming and sets everything up for him. She asks him to go downstairs and fill out the guestbook to check in. He notices that there are only two other people’s names in the book, Christopher Mulholland, and Gregory W. Temple. And all of a sudden, he notices these names are very familiar, and tells about how strange it is to the woman. She responds that they are all very handsome men, just like him, and they both are on the 4th floor.
She then shows how that all of the animals in the lobby are stuffed, and the man is shocked, looking at them again, and now realizing that he had missed that detail completely. The woman says that she personally stuffs all of her pets when they die. She then tells him that he is her first customer in two years.
I found this story very creepy and interesting, and i created many theories about the backstory of all this. I started to think that only people the woman thinks that are “handsome” can see this building, like the Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter, because they have such little customers. i also think that the other men in the bed and breakfast are dead and stuffed, like her pets. The Landlady left me very curious to what had happened, but left me hanging on detail. This is the mark of a interesting story, and if the author had continued, I would be thrilled to read it.