Harvard lecturer Laura van den Berg on her new novel, “The Third Hotel”
Laura van den Berg teaches fiction workshops as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Harvard’s Creative Writing Program. In her new novel, “The Third Hotel,” van den Berg writes about a young widow who travels to Cuba after the death of her husband, a horror film scholar. Born and raised in Florida, van den Berg has published two story collections and the novel “Find Me,” which was longlisted for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize. We talked to her about formative slasher movies, losing your bearings, and having the good fortune of writing “The Third Hotel” in a haunted house. Q&A Laura van den Berg GAZETTE: When did your interest in horror films develop? VAN DEN BERG: I started watching in college. There were all these slasher films — the “Scream” movies, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” — and this, to my mind, was around the time when the “final girl” trope — the...