Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for giving me a free eARC of this book to read in exchange for my review!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

I found myself thinking about this book even when I wasn’t reading it. It is certainly not an “easy read,” in fact, it’s probably the opposite of that. It’s complicated, imaginative and endlessly fascinating. I found myself unable to put it down, trying to piece together the nuances and get inside Lindsay’s head. I know there will be readers who put this book down and not fully understand what happened. But we don’t need to fully understand to love this book. It’s an imaginative work of art. We are not owed the answers; we can just be grateful we got a piece of Lindsay’s imagination.

This debut novel is perfectly moody, heading into the Hallowe’en season. Its stories are split between two characters, Clytemnestra and Jaime. The former works in a hotel where guests book rooms in which they can confront their grief. She meets Edith, a guest who spices up her life but puts her employment at risk. Ultimately, common grounds are revealed as Clytemnestra’s own grief comes to light. In Jaime’s story, the character seeks a job at a hotel but is forced to stay longer than expected when a mysterious fog descends on the city and guests fight for their survival and sanity.

All in all, these two hotels serve as the novel’s other main characters, setting the atmosphere as each protagonist face life-changing events. Thank you to Creature Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC.

I didn’t get this book at all. There were two separate stories that had some vague similarities but never really converged. Literally no questions are answered. I think the author was trying too hard to be artsy and mysterious and it just is a slow, boring mess that doesn’t make sense.

This one missed the mark on me. The Gold Persimmon by Lindsay Merbaum is a good read, with talented storytelling and solid writing... but it just didn't capture my attention. I slogged through it, feeling bored and tired of reading it at every step. Maybe it would work for others, but it didn't for me.

I have never read anything like this. For me it was a cross of sci-fi and a mild horror book. The book opens with Cly working at a hotel and becomes involved sexually with a married woman who frequents the hotel. She is married and her husband is aware of the relationship. A mysterious fog engulfs the city and we meet Jaime whose main task becomes protecting herself against the variety of people at the hotel.

I really wanted to love this book, but the ending fell flat for me. I wasn't sure what the ending actually was and wish we had gotten some more clarity.

Thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for a copy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The Gold Persimmon is a weird book (that can be a good thing!). For the most part, it seems like two separate stories with similar elements (hotel setting, mother issues, etc), but in the details there are suggestions of something else.

If I were judging based on the separate stories themselves, I'd say the first we're introduced to (Cly's) is more deeply emotionally interesting. We just see more of the main character than we do of all the separate characters in the second story. While some hints of powerful emotional thought was around in the second story, I just got too little of each person to really feel a resonant connection to them. The second story was, however, more weird interesting from the get-go. When the first story got weird, though, it got weird quick and snapped shut right after. It leaves a lot of questions, which I was fine with in this book. It didn't feel like a cop out here like it can in other stories.

Putting the two individual stories together as I gathered I was supposed to, I'll admit I'm not sure what was going on between the two. I would read the book again to see if I got it on a more focused, aware read through before judging the book on the connection.

Being that we spend so much more time focused Cly in the first story, I think she was obviously better drawn than the characters in the second story. That said, the second story characters didn't seem cardboard. I didn't know much about them, but they didn't sound like stereotypes or tropes. They just seemed like real people I didn't see much of. That's a feat of writing.

I would recommend The Gold Persimmon to a more specific audience than most books I read. It's not a book if you want something easy to understand with everything on or near surface level. I like those books at times, but this is one you read when you want to chew on it a while after you're done. While it has horror elements, I don't think you have to have a specific horror interest, and the horror is never strongly explicit or gory.

Thank you to NetGalley and Creature Publishing, Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) for the digital ARC. Unfortunately,I was unable to read this book because I was nit able to download it on time.

I’m only give a 2 ⭐️ because I have to give a rating. This does not reflect the book at all.

The Gold Persimmon is a winding, mythic, literary tale that will leave you wondering what is real and what isn't. The Gold Persimmon is similar to The Shining and Shirley Jackson.

Story: 2.5⭐️

Clytemnestra lives for the Gold Persimmon; the hotel “is a precisely ordered world full of musts and musn’ts,” and Cly is a strict adherent to its rituals and worships at the altar of its silence. She loves that guests are assigned individual check-in slots that prevent them from gathering to chat; loves the soundproofing that keeps the chaos of the outside world from intruding; loves the sense of identity being one with the hotel provides her. To Cly ,the Gold Persimmon is everything a person could want in terms of safety, protection, and absolute privacy. Yet, when a hotel guest persuades Cly to meet her at the end of her shift, Cly breaks the one irredeemable rule—no interaction with the guests outside your function as an extension of the hotel.

Newly minted college graduate Jaime finds herself following the prescribed path of aspiring writer with its stereotypical joys and obstacles—finding peace and escape in scribbling in notebooks while being harangued by an unsupportive parent to stick to the “correct” and acceptable path in both career choice and identity. Threatened with discontinuation of financial support, Jaime applies for a job at the Red Orchid hotel the same day an inexplicable fog engulfs NYC. What begins as a simple oddity that keeps Jaime, three guests, and three hotel employees from leaving the hotel becomes an increasingly bizarre and nightmarish game for control and dominance. Haunted and hunted in varying ways, Cly and Jaime stumble around their shifting realities as the walls they’ve built and rules they’ve clung to cease to exist; the cost of freedom potentially too high to pay.

"The Gold Persimmon" is billed as an experimental feminist horror novel dealing with several large and small themes that connect the two POV characters, Clytemnestra and Jaime, and is told in three parts with Jaime’s POV being bookended by Clytemnestra’s. Both POVs are told in first-person present tense, which gives the story a sense of presence and immediacy that works for it. The horror found in Part II is the most typical version as the longer the seven people are locked together in the hotel to avoid the ominous fog, the more their inner demons, desires, and weaknesses come out to create discord and a volatile gender divide. However, the horror is very much in the vein of Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Stepford Wives” where the everyday, systemic horrors of what is considered acceptable treatment of women is made manifest in the physical forms of “normal” people. Cly’s journey seems more like a framing device where the terror of facing herself, tragedy, obscurity, and all the daily specters she lets take pieces of her identity in exchange for willful ignorance is plainly established to set up Jaime’s reality. Cly is confronted by the outside force of Edith, the guest with whom she becomes entangled and is forced to interact with the loud, messy, emotional spillover of figurative demons, while Jaime is confronted by the physical spillover of inner demons given corporeal form.

While grief is the most explicit theme, in my opinion, the most important to the characters is the unknowable, unknown and escape. Both Jaime and Cly begin their journeys as insulated, fragmented people. Neither have any sense of self and cling to one idea as the monolith of their identity and means of escape—for Jaime this is being an aspiring writer, for Cly being a check-in clerk at the eponymous hotel or in her words a priestess of her temple. They navigate their mental, emotional, and external worlds based on this defining idea, and fall back on rigidly held behavioral norms to deal with the distracting, mundane assaults of anything that doesn’t pertain to the hotel or writing, the most notable being their parental interactions, as part of Jaime and Cly’s disconnect from their identities seem largely due to unstable, demanding, and unhappy mothers and quietly supportive fathers whose personalities have been subsumed by the fractious needs and unquenchable wants of their wives.

There are several different threads of connection and contrast between Jaime and Cly, and if you enjoy the writing style, many allusions and symbols to unpack. That being said, "The Gold Persimmon" just didn’t resonate with me. Some of it has to with the writing style and some from overblown expectations. Going in, I expected the writing style to play with structure and words choice, and initially, enjoyed Merbaum’s play on words and symbols. But as Part I progressed, I found myself disengaging from the story. Cly is named after a character in Greek legend, and as it’s a story I only have a vague familiarity with, I kept wondering if I was missing some important inversion or allegory to the myth as the metaphors and prose began bordering on overwrought or overly opaque more often. Is Clytemnestra a subtle inversion of the original and/or an associated archetype as her personality is completely opposite that of her namesake? Since Cly’s mother shares more in common with Clytemnestra of legend is this symbolic of Cly’s mother’s power over her/their intermingled psyches/Cly’s electra complex complicated by being a lesbian? And on and on. This also primed me for mythological nods in Part II, and even though I was familiar with the allusions, I noticed so I wasn’t plagued so much by questions of authorial intention, and the storyline is less dreamlike and muted than Cly’s, there was still nothing to connect me to the characters and their experiences.

Honestly, I just didn’t find anything new or revelatory in "The Gold Persimmon". I looked up what “feminist horror” meant to the writer/publisher, and to put it bluntly, they’re not even slapping a fresh coat of paint on the genre and calling it new, they’re just renaming red as cherry red and calling it new. As a fan of horror in literature and film from all eras, horror in its earliest inceptions has always been a useful and impactful vehicle for social commentary; from its roots in dark, aggressive folktales and myths to becoming its own fully-fledged genre, the monsters and terrors more often than not serve as avatars for cautionary tales, societal norm enforcement, and unrests of the day. So feminist horror being “storytelling which uses horror tropes to explore feminist issues” is not new, and neither in its use of horror tropes, myths, or symbolism did "The Gold Persimmon" plow virgin soil for me. Maybe I’ve just read too many articles and books on feminist discourse lately, but there aren’t any compelling new takes on familiar topics that spoke to me as a woman or a feminist. I think "The Gold Persimmon" may appeal more to readers who are new to horror, typically avoid the genre because it’s most known for violence/gore, and/or just want a story centering quilt bag characters as it’s esoteric style and queer perspective are the story’s defining features.

This was a pretty fast read and after I struggled to get through some other books lately it was refreshing to find an author who writes clearly and gets right into it.

I saw all the praise this book had received and was excited as I am whenever I find books written by LGBTQIA or POC authors. Unfortunately I just didn't get it.

The book is divided into three parts and features two different narrators. I was a little confused how the beginning part and middle part are tied into each other. How does Jamie escape the fog? What caused the fog? Is Jamie the creator of the Gold Persimmon? Why was Edith (a truly toxic and vile person) even mentioned?

If someone is able to let me know what I'm missing I might be able to increase my star rating.

This debut novel is strange and tense, dark and atmospheric. There's a sense of strange claustrophobia and otherness from the get-go even though the book begins with a hotel worker being asked out. Following Cly and her new lover filled me with dread in a way I couldn't explain with no real clues in the book to lead me to this feeling.

I loved the story within a story that was this novel and how Jaime's story was wrapped up within Cly's in multiple ways, connecting the universes and also through format.

Though, I can't say I understood every part of these stories, they were always engaging, Merbaum's prose dragging me in even when I tried to pull away. I almost wouldn't have guessed this was a debut novel with how well it was written. I was so wrapped up in wanting to follow these characters and to know more of the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this book!

Booking a hotel room is a ritual of escape: soft robes, sheets changed by someone else, fantasies of room service on silver platters. For guests, checking in means checking out of everyday responsibilities. The same cannot be said for hotel staff. Described on HBO’s The White Lotus as “pleasant interchangeable helpers” who offer “an overall impression of vagueness that can be very satisfying,” receptionists, maids, and other workers often endure much less enjoyable experiences.

In The Gold Persimmon, Lindsay Merbaum’s debut novel, the demands of the hospitality industry are laced with dread as two characters navigate secretive hotels and personal horrors. Clytemnestra is a check-in girl at the titular Gold Persimmon, a discreet luxury hotel in New York City where guests come to grieve in private. She appreciates the hotel’s strict protocols, soundproofed rooms, and minimal interactions with guests. That is, until one named Edith pursues her romantically, simultaneously threatening Cly’s job and giving her space to explore her newfound sexuality.

In a parallel reality, Jaime, a nonbinary writer, arrives at the Red Orchid — a sex hotel with similar promises of privacy — for a job interview. A mysterious fog quickly engulfs Jaime’s New York, trapping them inside with a handful of guests and employees. Panic sets in and themed rooms resembling the Garden of Eden, an airplane bathroom, or simply filled with sex dolls transform from tantalizing to terrifying. Between bacchanal feasts in an abandoned kitchen and deadly power struggles, Jaime emerges from their shell just as the world closes in around them.

Through rich prose and an open-ended plot structure, Merbaum crafts a sensual, scary, and surprisingly hopeful story about survival. The queer feminist writer uses liminal spaces, locked doors, and hushed corridors to explore Jaime and Cly’s ambiguous relationships to grief, love, family, and their sense of self. Long after finishing The Gold Persimmon, readers will yearn for an extended stay within this tale.

Merbaum spoke with The Interlude about The Gold Persimmon, being a good literary citizen, and the need for more LGBTQ protagonists across all genres of fiction.

First of all, congrats on your debut novel! You’ve previously written essays and award-nominated short fiction. How did your creative process evolve as you wrote The Gold Persimmon?

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be an author. So throughout my college education, throughout getting my MFA, the long-term goal was always to write a novel. But the way that you become educated about fiction and often the way that fiction writing is taught is through short stories. So I spent many years writing stories and trying to figure out how I could actually transition from stories to novels, especially because it's such a big commitment. You're committed to those characters and that storyline for years, potentially. I have written a couple other books before this one that were kind of like practice for me, sort of a ramp up. By the time I got around to writing this, I was starting to find the kinds of characters and the kinds of stories that could keep my attention for extended periods of time. The process with this book was a long, difficult one. It was really like wandering my own way through a labyrinth, trying to figure out how to put this book together.

The twin hotels at the center of your novel are brimming with secrets, pain, and pleasure. Characters get lost and lose themselves within their halls. What draws you to hotels as sites for strange and scary experiences? And were there other hotels, fictional or otherwise, that you kept returning to as you wrote?

I'm really fascinated by hotels as liminal spaces. They are both public and private. Many things happen there that are seen and unseen. There's a whole hive of workers making the hotel's functioning possible. I also am really interested in the Japanese-style love hotels — which definitely comes out in part two of my book — which provide spaces for people who don't have somewhere to go to be alone to be together and be intimate, but also to explore a lot of fantasies. If you've ever seen photos of such hotels, the rooms often have really specific themes, like an igloo or a doctor's office or something like that. So I definitely continued to think about that and return to that.

But I also just thought about some of the more opulent or classier hotels that I've seen in my life, even if I didn't get to stay there myself, and the kind of mystery that they offer by virtue of presenting a very polished front that is designed to create a certain experience for the guests, regardless of what's really going on behind the scenes. In fact, as research, you could say, for this book — I was living in San Francisco when I wrote most of it — I booked a room at a rather nice hotel in downtown San Francisco, and stayed there with my notebook, writing characters and trying to imagine myself inside a room and what I might be experiencing.

Your main characters, Jaime and Cly, are coming of age while grappling with immense uncertainty and disaster. I couldn’t help but draw parallels between their stories and the lives of young adults during the pandemic, and, more broadly speaking, in the face of climate change and late capitalism. What’s one thing you want readers to take away from The Gold Persimmon?

That is a great introduction to that question. And it's interesting, because, of course, the pandemic hadn't happened yet, when I wrote it, and yet ended up feeling sort of predictive in some way. One takeaway...there's so many takeaways. I would like for readers to maybe look at this book and think about the nature of storytelling itself. Sometimes we get really bogged down on the details of "What exactly is happening, and how does the story wrap up, and what is the precise ending?" But this book is as much about storytelling itself, as it is the story contained within the novel, in the sense that through Jaime's experience, through their trauma, and the way that gets reconstituted into their own narrative, we get a little glimpse into what the writing process actually looks like from the inside, and how writers take in all of the stimulus around them like a filter, and then turn it into something else. While speaking at the same time to their own experience. That's one thing, but I could probably think of many others.

Jaime and Cly also join the slow-growing ranks of LGBTQ protagonists in the horror genre, Jaime being a nonbinary writer and Cly exploring her attraction to women. What are your hopes for the future of LGBTQ stories in the genre?

I would say, and this is beyond the genre as well, I hope to continue to increase visibility and diverse representation. For me, it's really important to write a diverse cast of characters, because that is the reality in our lived experiences in our world, and it feels like a missed opportunity to not do that, and to narrowly focus on characters that maybe have the same background or ethnicity as the writer themselves. I would love to see a greater diversity of nonbinary characters out there in a variety of forms, in terms of how they present their gender, what their personalities are like, what happens to them. I would love to see more stories with pansexual protagonists where we're not narrowly trying to fit them into a certain box of sexuality, and where also that fluidity is just taken for granted and accepted. That the fact that someone is different is not necessarily always cause for conflict or a catalyst in the story itself, but also that there are just characters who match who is out there in the world. Characters that allow people in the queer community, like myself, to see ourselves represented and to feel that connection, and that way of being seen.

Totally! You’ve been making ‘booktails’ lately — cocktails and mocktails based on contemporary fiction, including your own. Can you tell me about your mixology process?

Yes. So I am a big eater and drinker. I love all the sensual pleasures of life. I started making my own cocktails a few years ago, really. Before the pandemic, I was still living in California, and I was doing some creative coaching workshops and things and I was making cocktails on theme for those events. Honestly, the guests really liked the cocktails better than anything. So when I was talking to my publishers about creative ways to promote this book, or connect with readers, I said, "Okay, I'll make a cocktail for it." Right? Not realizing what I was necessarily signing myself up for. That took some months. I did six pairings, so six cocktails and six mocktails. It was really fun to try to express the experience of the book or the mood of the book through taste and smell, and other very tactile senses. But it's also a lot of work.

When I was finished with that, I was looking around and thinking, "Okay, well, what can I do to help other writers?" I've joined all these groups with other writers who have books coming out [and] we're all trying to support each other. Writing is a team sport, so they say, and I thought, ‘I'll just offer to make booktails for other people's books, as well.’ I honestly didn't really know what kind of response I would get, and it kind of blew up from there. I am currently just inundated with manuscripts to review and turn into cocktails. It's a way of talking about what my experience of their book was without actually completely using my words. It's a more visceral experience, and I think it has great emotional weight for that reason. And it's really fun.

How wonderful. On Twitter, you posted about potentially getting a tattoo to commemorate publishing The Gold Persimmon. Can you talk about the importance of artists celebrating their own work?

Yeah! I have a few different tattoos, all of which are meaningful for me, and I definitely think that every book that I publish will probably have some tattoo somewhere on my body to commemorate that. When you've worked for many, many years towards a specific goal, you imagine in your mind over and over and over how that's going to go, and how you're going to cry, and how you're going to feel, and how you're going to shout from rooftops and post all over Facebook. And the reality is often very different. Because there isn't one moment when you're publishing a book, there's a series of moments.

So there's all these milestones along the way, and instead of that contributing to more excitement, it often contributes to a blah feeling of like, "Okay, well, this is just the process." At the same time, you're so focused on the work that's involved with promoting your book, making sure that it's getting reviewed, going back and forth with your publisher on any number of details, that sometimes it doesn't feel super special. So I think getting inked for this book, putting something indelible on my body to honor it — that's a way of reminding myself about its importance. I think that's a way of carrying it with me through the rest of my writing career.

Do you have any advice for early-career writers? Especially Gen Z writers interested in fiction?

Writing is not for the faint of heart. It's a tough industry, and as it continues to evolve there are new ways to connect and get your work out there. But there also are additional challenges. So I would say to any young writer out there, especially a queer writer: be a good literary citizen, connect with other writers, read their work, support their work, talk about their work, when you read a book that you really connect with. Even if you think the writer is, like, far too famous to take notice of you, send them a note. Contact them to tell them what the book meant to you. Because a lot of people don't do that. Writers are not as inundated with these messages as you might think, and there's no way in which telling someone they did something amazing is a bad thing. There's no way to be offended by being complimented about the value of your work. Every writer wants to hear that. The other consequence of reaching out continually and supporting other people's work and really trying is that you start to build a network, you can get more information about how publishing actually works — because there's a lot of ins and outs that you aren't going to learn just on the face of it, no matter how much research you do. Then, when it's your turn, you'll have other people there for you, excited for your work, cheering for you, eager to review it or write a blurb. That makes the process so much easier.

Writing is a solitary thing. So sometimes we think, "Okay, it's just gonna be me alone, and I can't tell anyone what I'm writing until I have a book deal, and I can't talk about it until the book deal." And that's just simply not true. Sharing of yourself and what matters to you and other people often fosters connection. If you want to emotionally succeed as a writer, in addition to the more traditional parameters of success, you're going to need support, and you're going to need friends. So be friends with other writers, be kind to them, and be kind to yourself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Gold Persimmon is out Oct. 5, and you can order it here.

Would you want to work in an exclusive hotel that provides the utmost privacy for its guests? Cly relishes her job at the front desk at the Gold Persimmon, which provides staggered check-ins and unobtrusive service to its sensitive grieving clientele. There are strict employee rules, one of which Cly breaks when she begins a relationship with one of the hotel guests.

As Cly’s story comes to a close, Jaime goes for a job interview at The Red Orchid, an exclusive hotel for a completely different set. Jaime is unsure about working at a sex hotel, but before the interview is over, a strange fog closes in on the city and Jaime is trapped in the hotel with a handful of employees and guests. A creeping terror, reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Mist, arrives as Jaime, the guests, and the employees try to maintain order and sanity under the circumstances. Will they survive the unidentified menace?

Be prepared for some twists and turns in this suspenseful read with a cast of characters in transition. Cly is exploring her sexuality while enduring her critical mother’s interference. Jaime is seeking a comfort zone as a non-binary person in a world just beginning to understand what that means. Both characters are in tense situations, albeit in completely different ways, and grow to find the strength to act on their instincts of self-preservation.

Give this unique experimental novel a read. The main characters are engaging and their LGBTQ perspectives give the story depth with a modern edge. Merbaum has gifted readers two stories in one with a creative synergy that takes the whole to the next level.

I loved this book. Such a strange, fever dream of a tale. It was different. I loved the creepy atmosphere of the hotel. It was confusing in the middle for a wee bit, but made full circle. Definitely going to recommend this one.

Slow, atmospheric and dark, Lindsay Merbaum's debut novel reminds me of the most explicitly erotic works of Tanith Lee. That said, it doesn't ever feel like anything more than a genre novel. As for what that genre is exactly, I'd be hard pressed to say. Maybe, feminist queer horror fiction? Told via a pair of parallel stories involving two different protagonists, and set in parallel versions of New York city, the story felt closer to a writing exercise than a full-fledged novel. I'd be interested in seeing more from the writer, but this one was only so-so.

This book consists of two stories with the common connection of being set in strange hotels. The first story is split between parts one and three (of three.) This allows part one to tell a story that feels like straightforward realism (while part three is where the story gets a bit trippy and where – in that trippiness - the reader may see connections between the two stories that may or may not be intended.) It’s the story of Cly, an employee of a fancy hotel [The Gold Persimmon] that specializes in serving a grieving clientele, and her love affair with a regular guest, Edith, who is a physician. The strangest thing in this story is that Cly is probably the most attached to her job of any low-level hotel employee in the history of low-level hotel employees.

The second story’s protagonist, Jaime, is an aspiring writer of nonbinary gender identification who is about to take a job in another hotel, a Japanese-style love hotel. [For the unfamiliar, that means a place with themed rooms where people come for short-term stays to get their freak on – think: dungeon, subway train interior, etc.] This story gets weird almost immediately as a fog descends over the city leaving only a few employees and customers trapped together inside the hotel. This is a much more engaging story than the other. The few people in the hotel inexplicably go all “Lord of the Flies,” and the reader can’t be sure whether it’s descent into madness from whatever fog has enveloped the hotel, or whether they are mostly unstable from the start.

It’s extremely difficult to write surreal- / madness-based stories that aren’t distractingly unclear about what – if anything – is real. I felt this story suffered from two difficulties. First, Jaime’s internal monologue sways radically from what seems like extreme paranoia to very reasonable states, but we don’t know the character enough to have a baseline. Second, many of analogies used in describing events read a bit clunky, causing one to need to re-read to try to make sense of whether what is said is what is actually being seen or whether it’s just a confusing metaphor.

That said, I was engaged throughout the story, and found it compelling enough to need to keep reading. I’d say if you don’t mind some ambiguity and experimentation in writing, you’ll enjoy this book. If not, not.

This book is quite different from the types I usually pick up. I loved the protagonist, Cly, and her journey in understanding with Edith and hotel. I loved the mystery surrounding the hotel and the slow unveiling of it. The second part with Jamie was starkly different from Cly, and not as fun (even slightly scary) to read. Overall, I would recommend this book and might want a third part?