Ostensibly unconnected and critically underexplored, E.M. Forster’s hotel-related stories “The Story of a Panic” (1904) and “The Story of the Siren” (1920) seem to resonate with genuine hotel-generated melodrama(s). Both short stories were inspired by Forster’s respective hotel sojourns in Ravello and what reads as a synthetic amalgam of Palermo and Capri. They both belong to Forster’s Italian hotel literature and point to the author’s consistent hotel literariness. The geographical proximity of these (Tyrrhenian) hotel stories only accentuates the irony of the overarching tautological formula. The essay traces the new modes of being that Forster’s male protagonists dare to experience maintaining that they point to Forster’s modernist dialectics with the already established thread of literary melodrama. Viewing these stories through the lens of melodrama – manifested in the avant-garde sentimentality, queer ostentation, exaggeration, flamboyance, and theatricality of their protagonists – the essay serves to highlight their emotive potential culminating in the unsettlement of stereotypes. In a decidedly modernist turn, both “The Story of a Panic” and “The Story of the Siren” open up the possibility for unchartered territories and new modes of being, while triggering a backward dialectical movement that brings forth the forlorn legacy of melodrama as per Peter Brooks’ formulation. Thus, they generate genuine hotel melodrama.