Amir Harash

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Dr. Amir Harash is a writer, editor, and academic. His work spans a variety of genres, including detective fiction, fantasy, horror, and post-apocalyptic literature. Harash teaches writing and editing at Tel Aviv University and The College for Literary Arts in Jerusalem. He is also the editor-in-chief of Boo!, a journal dedicated to horror in literature, film, and culture, as well as BeDibbur – Publishing for the Ear, which specializes in spoken word poetry. Among his published books are Let the World Be Canceled (2013), Bronze (2019), and Breakdown and Bereavement (and Zombies) (2025). Harash has also published poetry, prose, and literary criticism in various journals, including Haaretz, Granta, Ma’aleh, and Moznaim. His writing for children and young adults includes two books: Mysteries at the See the Sea Hotel (2024) and Horror in West Rishon LeZion (2023), as well as short stories for children featured in Adam Tza'ir, Galileo Tza'ir, and Nanopoetika.

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Mysteries at the See the Sea Hotel

MG (9-12)

Publisher: Am Oved

Year: 2024

168 pp.

 

Translation rights: World

Audio visual rights: World

 

In the first book of The Case Crackers series, a group of young detectives faces the mysteries of life in a hotel for civilians who were evacuated from their homes, in northern and southern Israel, due to the ongoing war and constant missile attacks and alerts. The book deals with this complex situation with humor, wisdom, and courage. Nadav is completely fed up with the See the Sea Hotel. His family has been staying there for a long time, and it’s unclear when they’ll return home. So he decides to open a detective agency. Anyone is welcome to bring their problems, and Detective Nadav will solve them with his special ability to notice things that others miss. But he cannot solve everything alone. The mysteries keep getting more complicated: the taste of the food changes, the man with the braid enters the elevator and doesn’t come out for hours, a demon possesses a boy and refuses to leave, and even the hotel manager desperately needs help with a strange matter. Nadav recruits Alma, who knows how to talk to everyone; Mika, who’s an expert in monsters and vampires; and Nitai, who is still figuring out what he’s good at. Together, they’ll discover that only they - especially they - can save the hotel and themselves.

 

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Critical Praise

 

There is something both charming and essential about presenting an active response to circumstances that are inherently passive. It’s not that Harash tries to sugarcoat reality, but he does offer an alternative, perhaps even an important lesson that applies to life in general.

Shani Harari, Haaretz

 

Harash, whose excellent debut children's book Nightmare in West Rishon LeZion was published last year, once again draws from the horror genre. He takes the anomalous setting of an evacuated hotel - an almost endless limbo of alienation, uncertainty, pain, and memories - and blends it with vampires, demons, dark rituals, and suffocating spaces. This allows the readers to channel their real fears through the lens of imagination, while Harash engages, in an almost prosaic manner, with the losses his characters have experienced. He tells, in a fairly simple and direct way, about a grandmother who lost her grandson, a girl whose father has died, about the absence of home and the feeling of belonging. Even the characters’ reactions and interpretations of different situations hint at trauma, which, thanks to the horror genre’s framework, allows us to approach it, observe it, and touch it…

 

Within the pages of Harash’s book, a product of the instability in contemporary Israel, children are forced to take responsibility for their environment, to decipher the reality of a world that has betrayed them. In contrast, most of the adults in the book are either suspicious and dangerous figures or, alternatively, completely marginal. The fathers are either absent or dead, the mothers are emotionally distant and preoccupied with their own affairs, and the fact that the hotel manager appoints Nadav to investigate a series of sabotage and theft cases signals a lack of trust in the establishment and law enforcement… As a first breakthrough into true children’s literature in the context of the ongoing war and its aftermath, and as the first book in a series, Mysteries at the See the Sea Hotel offers genuine originality and creativity, once again marking Harash as a promising children’s author.

Mor Fogelman Dvorkin, Yediot Aharonot

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