E.L. Chen’s Sweetside Motel just hit shelves on March 2, 2026, and at 138 pages, it’s a fast, unsettling little novella that wastes no time pulling you in.

At its core, Sweetside Motel is about a woman trying to escape one bad situation and landing in another. Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, the book blends small-town suspicion, outsider tension, and personal trauma into a setup that feels claustrophobic from the start. There’s an immediate sense that something is off, and that tension is what really drives the story forward.

What worked for me right away was how quickly the story pulls you into that situation. The opening wastes no time establishing that Sarah is in trouble and trying to get away from something in her past. I also appreciated the way the book handles her position as an outsider. Some comments get made early on that feel loaded before you fully understand why, and I actually liked that. It created that moment of pause where you’re thinking, wait, what exactly do they mean by that? When the context becomes clearer later, it adds another layer to how the town views her.

I also liked the core mystery a lot. The small-town hostility, the fear of outsiders, the racial tension, and the sense that something is very off there all made the story feel tense and compelling. Even when I had issues with parts of the execution, I was still fully into it the whole way through, and that says a lot.

Where it lost me a little was in the worldbuilding around the pandemic. Since we’re now several years removed from that period, some of it felt harder to buy in the exact way it was framed. I could absolutely believe a closed-off small town using a virus as an excuse to distrust outsiders. That part makes sense. But some of the social dynamics around it felt a little conflicting to me, and I found myself wishing the story had maybe used a fictional virus or pushed that angle into something even more unsettling. I think that might have made the setting feel stronger and more believable on its own terms.

I also thought the novella felt rushed in some of the relationship-building. Sarah’s connections with certain people escalate very quickly, and I had a hard time fully buying the level of trust and reliance that developed in such a short amount of time. At the same time, she can be very back-and-forth in her decisions, which made her frustrating in places. She’s written as someone coming from abuse, and I do think that part of the book adds something worthwhile. There’s an interesting thread here about how abuse changes people, and how survival can twist the way someone reacts to others. That part felt real. But as a character, Sarah was still hard for me to fully like, and that made the emotional side a little shakier than I wanted.

That said, I really do think this story could have been even stronger with a little more room to breathe. This is one of those books where I found myself wishing it dug deeper into its relationships, its setting, and some of the emotional beats. There’s enough here to support more development, and I honestly would have welcomed it.

Overall, Sweetside Motel is a quick, engaging horror novella with a strong hook, a compelling mystery, and an atmosphere of isolation and suspicion that kept me interested from start to finish. I didn’t love every choice, especially when it came to some of the worldbuilding and the speed of certain character dynamics, but I still found it to be a really solid read.