Delilah S. Dawson’s Midnight at the Houdini is a young adult novel that primarily takes place at a hotel. Not just any hotel, of course—this establishment, the titular Houdini, is infused with mysterious magic where most of the residents are ghosts, and there seems to be no way to check out before becoming one yourself when the clock strikes midnight. The Houdini also oozes in dark, decadent, 1920s-style vibes. If the supernatural establishment had marketing copy, it would be something like, “It’s not just a destination, but a state of being.”
Unfortunately, the state of being for most of its residents is obliviously non-corporal. As they flit in and out of view, each stuck in their own recurring loop of something they did at the Houdini before becoming literally insubstantial just adds to the mystery of the building. How or why they’ve become ghosts, however, is unexplained. And that’s okay—Midnight at the Houdini purposefully emphasizes ambiance.
In support of this point, Dawson dedicates the book to the Sleep No More experience at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, a show where guests wear masks and walk freely from one intricately designed room to another (some of which may include secret passageways) as actors loosely enact scenes from Macbeth. Having been to Sleep No More myself, the mysterious, darkly mystical vibe of the experience comes through in various scenes throughout Midnight at the Houdini, though many readers will likely see some similarities with The Shining as well.
But while magic practically seeps through the walls of the Houdini’s dark secret passages and richly decorated labyrinthian hallways, don’t expect to get a thorough explanation of how that magic works. This is not a book centered around developing a detailed magic system—it is instead a story drenched in an early 19th-century atmosphere, a hotel you fully check into when you read.
But Midnight at the Houdini is also about its characters, particularly the teenage protagonist, Anna.
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Midnight at the Houdini
Anna lives in contemporary Las Vegas with her sister and parents, where her father is a bigwig real estate developer. After the night of her sister’s wedding, however, Anna, her dad, and his two business partners find themselves fleeing in their limo from a sudden, inexplicable hurricane rife with tornadoes, and seek shelter in the Houdini, a rundown hotel and casino off of the strip that also happens to be Anna’s father’s first investment. Anna rushes inside the hotel ahead of her dad and finds herself in an apparently empty building. The Houdini she enters (and the one that her father and his cohorts enter soon after) is not the mundane edifice she expects. This is an enchanted place, one that has a certain set of rules. And while it is full of ghosts, there are some mortal beings who reside there, specifically a woman who appears to run it all, a teenage boy who was born inside the Houdini’s walls, and a malicious janitor who manages to make things even dirtier wherever he cleans.
The book’s plot is simple: Anna must find her father and figure out how to escape the hotel before the clock strikes midnight and she’s stuck inside its walls forever, doomed to become another ghost caught in the same loop, unable to see or move outside of a predetermined routine. Max, the teenager born inside the Houdini, helps her in her quest, in no small part because the hotel—via a magical automaton—has been drawing pictures of her since he was a child, and he is properly infatuated with her.
While the journey Anna takes through the magical rooms and corridors of the hotel are front center, it’s also clear that Anna’s looming fate in the Houdini is a metaphor for the life she led before becoming trapped inside the Houdini. As Dawson describes in chapter 27 of the book:
Anna’s life is a tightrope, a carefully planned path to hit all the right notes, check off all the right boxes, never stand out, never make a splash, unless it’s by winning too many certificates of recognition at the end-of-the-year assembly.
Anna became this way after she was ridiculed at another girl’s birthday party when she was ten years old. She walked away from that event fearful of being teased once more. What she didn’t hold on to that day, however, was the peculiar interaction she had with the magician there, a mysterious man who did the impossible: He made her older sister’s lost earring reappear and, as such, caused her to forgive Anna.
Without getting into spoilers, Anna has a clear arc from the person she was before she entered the Houdini and where she ends up at the end of the book. That arc is an important one—and one I’m glad that readers similar in age to Anna will get to see play out on the page.
It’s her journey as well as the ambiance Dawson creates in the Houdini that stand strong in this book, making it a worthy read for those who look for those elements when adding to their TBR pile. Those looking for an intricately developed magic system or an explanation for how the magic in the story works will have several unanswered questions, however, when Midnight at the Houdini ends. Some mysteries remain ineffable in the end. Max “explains” the magic succinctly to Anna in chapter 14 of the book:
“I’ve read up on magic, science, religion, and philosophy, trying to make sense of it all, and this one quote really hit home for me. Something about how we think we know what’s possible, but the magician proves otherwise.”
And like a magician, the magic of the Houdini doesn’t truly reveal its tricks (though we do get some answers to some things). The book instead embraces the mystery that can come with magic, and, as Max says, uses it to transport us into a different world and change the characters we follow for the better.
Midnight at the Houdini is published by Delacorte Press.
Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.
