Nightmare Inn is a series of young adult horror novels by Todd Strasser, who penned the books using the pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 T. S. Rue (another pen name he sometimes uses is Morton Rhue). It is a brief series that contains only four installments, all of them published in 1993; the books were distributed by HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

, who released them in both paperback and hardcover editions.

Nightmare Inn is not only the official title of the series, but is also the title of the first book. The remaining novels are titled Room 13, The Pool and The Attic. The books were published in the same time period in which R.L. Stine was enjoying phenomenal success with his highly popular Fear Street

Fear Street

Fear Street is a teenage horror fiction series written by American author R. L. Stine, starting in 1989. In 1995, a series of books inspired by the Fear Street series, called Ghosts of Fear Street, was created for younger readers, and were more like the Goosebumps books in that they featured...

novels, but Strasser's saga was short-lived; whether this was the intention of the author or the result of poor sales is unknown, but the entire series has been out of print for many years.

HarperCollins included the books in its Nightmares series, a group of novels that have no relation to each other besides their themes of horror. Nightmare Inn, The Pool and The Attic were published in an anthology called Nightmare Inn: Three Books In One.

Plot overview

All the books of the series are set at the same location, the New Arcadia Inn, formerly known as the Arcadia Inn. The resort is luxurious and located in a forest in the northeastern part of the United States. It has a gruesome history of murder and violence from beyond the grave. All the primary characters are teenagers, which is a common format of the young adult novels. Though each book is a stand alone story, they are all inter-connected by two recurring characters, a young girl named Sarah (who plays an important part in the first novel and is portrayed as a secondary character in subsequent stories) and the inn's caretaker-cum-manager, who is intimately familiar with the hotel's history.