User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
i think this is the first horror i’ve ever read where characters say “fuck” an appropriate amount of times
Rating: really liked it
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
if you like reading horror novels for their rich character development where all your questions about their individual and collective pasts are answered, move along. if you like reading horror novels because you want to be in the same WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? headspace as the characters for a little while, have a seat—you're gonna love this haunted house story.
a group of five friends reunite in japan for a destination wedding, renting a heian-era mansion where obscenely wealthy golden boy-heir phillip will officiate the sacred union of faiz and talia. it would all be picture-postcard idyllic, except for the fact that the mansion's already got a bride in it—or what's left of one: the bones of a woman whose almost-husband died on the way to their wedding, who had herself buried alive in the foundation to wait for his ghost to come home. and every year after that, another girl was buried alive in the walls, to keep her company.
now, in a
typical ghost story, this tragic-wedding backstory would be an unexpected discovery, causing concern and dismay amongst the wedding guests, but here it's a selling point. these particular friends grew up ghosthunting through malaysia together, and blushing bride talia's girlhood dream was to be married in a haunted house. wish = granted.
...the interior didn't smell like it'd had people here, not for a long, long time, and smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that'd forgotten what it was like to eat.
the dream wedding quickly becomes a nightmare, but not—at first—for the reasons you'd expect. the guests have all brought their own ghosts with them, in the form of old grievances, secrets, flirtations, and conflicts, and none of them seem to like each other very much.
our ingress into the story is cat, a woman whose unspecified mental instability; her 'terminal ennui,' made her suicidal and led to a hospitalization from which she has not really recovered. there's also a particular hostility between her and talia, and with the arrival of lin, a consummate disruptor, the tensions between all of them escalate, fueled by alcohol, creepy games, and, you know, being assailed by a parade of demons.
there's a lot left unsaid here, when it comes to the characters' shared past, and who has beef with whom and why, but when it comes to the horror elements, every disturbing and grotesque situation is laid out in thick chewy prose, even if i couldn't always wrap my head around the visuals, which is a long-standing me-problem.
although wayyyyyy more graphic than shirley jackson, it's very shirley jackson-esque in the way it sets up the seductive nature of a haunting to a character whose fragile mental health empathizes with the loneliness of the restless dead and catches that yearn:
You know how poets say sometimes that it feels like the whole world is listening?
It was just like that.
Except with a house instead of an auditorium of academics, collars starched, textbooks like scriptures, each chapter color-coded by importance. The manor inhaled. It felt like church. Like the architecture had dulled its heartbeat so it could hear me better, the wood warping, curling around the room like it was a womb, and I was a new beginning. Dust sighed from the ceiling. Spiderwebs fell in umbilical cords, a drape of silver.
It felt like the house talking to me through the mouths of moths and woodlice, the creak of its foundations, the little black summer ants chewing through what remained of our food like we'd left bodies, not balled-up, slickly gleaming cling wrap. The air smelled of raw meat, lard, and bits of seared protein.
I hoped to hell in that moment that she was listening.
Half because I was tired of being unloved, being pitied like a fawn panting its last handful of breaths into a ditch. Half because I hoped it was all true.
A little bit of magic.
Even if it was hungry.
Even if it was a house with rotting bones and a heart made out of a dead girl's ghost, I'd give it everything it wanted just for scraps. Some unabridged attention, some love.
Even if it was from a corpse with blackened teeth.
Anything to feel alive again right now.
it's a dark and icky story, but lin's frequent "You guys go do protagonist shit" meta-commentaries on horror tropes provide some welcome comic relief through the onslaught.
you're gonna be left with some questions at the end: relationships are messy, mental health is messy, hauntings are messy. there are books that do a better job making you understand and care about the characters, but sometimes you just wanna turn over a rock and watch things squirm.
P.S. i want whoever did the cover art for this book...do the work, karen...samuel araya—DEAR SAMUEL ARAYA, please illustrate some of the...occurrences in this book, specifically dolls and kitsune and tanuki k thx.
P.P.S. my ARC informed me that there is a 'preorder campaign with promotional item' for this book, so i RACED to find out what this item could be.
it is one of these:
i do not have a phone—who has suggestions about how to repurpose one of these things?
preorder link
*******************************************
i want to wallpaper my apartment with this cover.
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
Wait a minute! Did I read the blurb correctly? Is this book about a wedding celebration at one of the creepiest, most ominous and terrifying place at Heian- era Japanese mansion built by the resting bones of a bride and remains of girls who sacrificed themselves to accompany her?
What a batshit, mind bending plot line!
After reading the blurb and taking a very long look at the impactful, haunted cover that may give you nightmares for the entire month, I simply screamed: I’m all in!
This is quiet brilliant Japanese folklore waltzes with fables full of metaphors and allegories meet mystery/ thriller genres! A realistic approach to mental illness and fractured friendship patterns.
It was hooking but I wish instead of stuck at the creative author’s mind who presents us lots of metaphors with embellished depictions, I’d like to see more action packed, moving story of the characters. The writing style was unique but it was also too complex and wordy at some parts. You want to focus on the mystery and events instead of philosophical approach between similarities of ghosts and real people’s way of handling things.
But I enjoyed the originality and the criticism of broken friendship and tense atmosphere which push me to read till the end at one seat.
I’m cutting some points because of unbalanced pace ( too slow with long metaphorical elaborations but some parts are too fast to absorb! )
Overall: I think the half star I gave because of this stunning cover and I’m giving my 3.5 starts to be rounded up to 4 heart pounding, claustrophobic, gothic, very disturbing, Japanese stars!
Special thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan -Tor/ Forge for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest opinions.
Rating: really liked it
These characters drove me absolutely insane 🤯 They ruined the entire experience for me, and this book premise had SO much potential so I’m big sad that I didn’t like this one 😭
Reading vlog: https://youtu.be/1-Q5QE_faPY
Rating: really liked it
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC. Listen to the full review at: https://bookclubbed.buzzsprout.com/
Horror novels are hard—using words to conjure images to creep you out as you sit on your hammock outside in the sun. But she decided to not even try and instead focus on showing off how clever she is. Being clever is easy—there is nothing behind it, no emotion, no greater truths, no human connection—it is simply a brief blip of intellectual flexing of the bicep or showing off your tanned midriff, and then moving onto the next thing:
We start with a promising premise: a group of twentysomethings stay in a haunted mansion, one tethered to a classic ghost tale, almost wanting to provoke a ghost encounter to get their money’s worth. This group of young adults have all either slept with each other, dated, or at the very least kindled some sexual tension. That, it turns out, is the crux of the novel, their feisty little exchanges going from humorous to exhausting about ten pages in.
True horror requires—as far as I can tell—a building of tension, a careful construction of suspense even if we think we know where it is going. The fear comes not in the eventual breaking of it but in the meticulous build-up. There is no suspense in this novella. Instead, there is petty arguing, emotionally distanced mocking of the characters by the author, and occasional insertions of ghosts whenever the author remembered what genre she was supposedly writing for.
Characters accuse other characters of acting like a protagonist, they casually discuss the tropes of a ghost story, and at one point the writer actually mentions that: “(r)ead a hundred books on horror, and you’ll find that every last one possesses at least one mention of someone’s eyes gone strange, unfocused and unsettling to witness.” It is not clever, not thought-provoking, not grounding us in the scene. It is an ironic reflex, one in which the author is unable to escape, more preoccupied with slapping similes on each character’s reaction than cultivating vulnerability, the slow drip of horror that the best authors of the genre do so well, or, you know, plot.
When we get our first encounter with ghost bride, meant to inspire horror (I think?) we get a long description of how neurons respond in the brain followed by a hacky joke that relies on rearranging where the word “fucking” stands in the sentence. I love a goofy joke like this, but the placement was jarring. This is the author in conversation with herself, a hyper-exaggerated bombardment, closer to a satire of contemporary writing than a real novel.
So, what is this book? A reality show inspired novella? A satire of horror? A mash-up of horror and self-effacing Millennial ennui? What it is, really, is a writing prompt, a clever writer who is quite impressed with how clever she can be, shoving a list of vocabulary words and similes into the distorted form of a story.
Rating: really liked it
**3.5-stars rounded up**Nothing But Blackened Teeth has wormed its way into my mind and it won't go away. I cannot stop thinking about it!
I finished this story early this morning and have slowly raised my rating incrementally as the day has worn on. I started at 3-stars, in 12-hours, I have rounded up to 4-stars. Who knows how high this could go!?
What could be better than a long-abandoned, reportedly-haunted, Heian-era mansion as a intimate destination wedding location?
For Nadia and Faiz, nothing. Nadia has always wanted to get married in a haunted mansion and after their friend, Phillip, buys them all first class tickets to Japan, now is their chance.
The group, made up of Nadia, Faiz, Cat, our narrator, Phillip and Lin, do not all get along. In fact, I wondered frequently why they were traveling together.
Nadia and Cat hate each other, as do Lin and pretty much everyone else, except for Cat. There is tension and messy history; it's a whole thing. As if the haunted mansion wasn't enough, the stress of their interactions raised my heart rate.
As this is an novella, it is pretty clear right from the start that the reportedly haunted mansion, is indeed quite haunted. There's not a lot of filler to get through.
This story revolves around a Ohaguro Bettari, which translated, if I am informed correctly, actually means, nothing but blackened teeth. This is a type of Yokai that I have never come across before and I found it fascinating.
Additionally, I have really only ever read about Yokai in Japanese-inspired Fantasy stories, which of course, is generally Dark Fantasy, but reading about Yokai in the Horror genre was completely new for me. I loved that aspect.
The haunted house vibes and the way that was presented was so engaging. I couldn't stop turning the pages. It was really well imagined.
I think my main issue with this story was in the presentation; the writing style, or the narrative voice. I'm not sure which.
The writing, at first glance, seems overdone. The use of ridiculously obscure vocabulary and nonstop, unnecessarily overwrought prose really rubbed me the wrong way while I was reading it.
The more I think about it though, I don't think this was the author showing that they are the most intelligent person in the room, I think it is the personification of Cat's character.
I could be interpreting this completely wrong, but I feel like Cat's character, who doesn't seem to like herself, had her intelligence as the one thing she could count out. Towards the end, as she was having one of her numerous fights with Nadia, she says how smart she is.
I am smart, she exclaims.
Since the entire narrative is pretty much her inner monologue, I started to think about the story in that way, as that being her voice. Her way of seeing the world actually used those big words. That's her crutch and it started to make sense that way.
After I had that realization, I became more forgiving about those aspects of the story that so heavily turned me off initially.
As this is a novella, there's not a lot of build up and it did seem to end rather abruptly. As Horror novellas go, however, I would say this is a really strong one. It will definitely stick in my mind for a long time to come.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Tor Nightfire, for providing me with a copy to read and review.
I would definitely be interested in picking up more from Cassandra Khaw!
Rating: really liked it
Five friends rent out a haunted old Japanese house for a spooky wedding - but turns out them advertised ghosts is real and ghosty is getting revengey!
Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth appealed to me because it’s a haunted house story, which I love, and it’s set in an old Japanese house, which I’ve never seen before, so it’s disappointing to say the book is actually a stinky pile of ectoplasm.
Horror in general is hard to write and really good haunted house stories are few and far between, but Nothing But Blackened Teeth fails especially badly at both attempts. All that happens is that the group run around the old house at night while the ghost possesses one of them and smiles, showing off its blackened teeth. It’s such unimaginative storytelling.
The cast are an unlikeable group of moronic upper-class twonks. Why they’re friends at all in the first place is a mystery as they seem to loathe each other from the beginning. Almost all of the book is these five idiots bickering about their past relationships and vapid love triangles with one another. I didn’t care about any of it or what was going to happen to them.
Khaw seems to think it’s clever to have some of the characters break the fourth wall by talking about “this is the part in the movie/story where this character dies/this thing happens, har har”, which isn’t smart, it’s annoyingly twee and irrelevant. She also throws in Japanese terms to describe the ghost’s appearance - like ohaguro-bettari and shiromuku - without explaining what they are, so you can’t picture what on earth she’s talking about.
Lazy cliches abound - the house happens to have a library that happens to have a book explaining the ghostly situation and how to fight the evil spirit (how convenient!) - and the backstory of the haunting couldn’t be less creative. The ending is contrived rubbish and the “emotional” finale is painfully forced.
This book reads like an amateurish first draft. Thoroughly underwhelming and boring garbage through and through, don’t bother with Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Bad Writing!
Rating: really liked it
This wasn't it, chief.
I had this shelved as "horror" but what the fuck: Dora the Explorer is scarier.
In my life as a reader, I came across terrible, awful writing and the worst similes...or so I thought. I was treated to lines such as "the boots hugged my calves like hands" (The Iron Thorn), "crackling like a cat's fur during a thunderstorm" (The House of Dead Maids), some love interest's hands that were so hot they fogged the glass (Hourglass). Add to the list this example of dreadful repetitive writing "SHE WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD! Crazy/Go away, crazy, SHE WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD!" (Amity). These are just very few examples but enough to prove that I'm no longer easily horrified.
This book, however, took the cake. I want to make a formal apology to all these books I just threw under the bus: you were not the worst, you were far from being the absolute worst.
Cassandra Khaw was too preoccupied working on her ridiculous writing to illustrate how unstable her main character was, so busy with her idiotic similes she forgot to write a story.
"Her footsteps frictionless as envy."(The author actually thought that was good and her editor didn't see a problem with that either. File under "how the fuck did this happen?")
"...a predatory stillness that drove a scream through the medulla oblongata."(Because of course, when you're terrified about the prospect of being trapped in a dilapidated mansion with that eyeless handsome woman, the first thing that comes to mind is the medulla oblongata. I can completely relate, whenever I find myself in a situation of unbearable distress, I always think of the pituitary gland and the inner workings of the digestive system.)
And for my favorite; oh this is a treat for the masses.
"...the sinsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he'd left the sun."I am now a true believer that what's been seen cannot be unseen. How? What brain can think of such stupid, ridiculous, pretentious garbage.
This is garbage from someone who thinks she's a good writer.
Now, listen. I know there are myths about coyotes and their lies; one, I think, was about it telling its first lie about not laughing (Wikipedia it if you want to dig deeper, I'm running out of fucks here). So, this could be tied to a myth or saying I ignore; I will give it the smallest benefit of the doubt because Cassandra is from Malaysia and I'm not familiar with her folklore or any Malaysian sayings, phrases or stories.
That's it, the benefit of the doubt will go no further.
(And for the record: if there is some form of saying/myth/folk tale that would clarify that mess, I will take it back and edit it. But good luck explaining the fucking medulla oblongata.)
There's a difference between being lyrical, witty, unconventional or any alternative descriptor you want to use to justify this pile of shit. Cat never came across as an eccentric and disturbed woman whose mind went every which way. It came out forced and desperate for applause.
The story? What story? 5 assholes who can't stand each other end up together in a Heian-era mansion Phillip the "privileged" (wink wink; he was called that maybe 7 times during the book. We got it, Cass; your winking became Morse code) rented to celebrate a wedding. By the time ghost lady made her appearance I didn't even notice: the moment got so lost in Cat's clever similes I thought she was talking about her luggage. Okay then, ghost's here, let's roll. And rolling I did, but by myself with nothing but smelly grass stuck to my ass for company. Nothing fucking happened.
Cassandra had all the tools: a run down mansion, black-toothed, eyeless angry spirit with a heavy history and a lot of baggage...all squandered in purple bullshit writing. What came out of it...well... think The Woman in Black/Blairwitch meets piece of shit.
And the way they fixed a problem? (view spoiler)
[ In a dilapidated library full of books covered in mold, they happened across THIS book that had carefully written instructions on how to undo the curse which was bad enough, except that some pages prior, the groom who read the instructions admitted not speaking Japanese. So, what language was it written in? I mean, the book found in a Heian-era mansion in Japan that was written centuries ago? Even the ghost spoke Japanese, so how were they able to read it? Was it, maybe, conveniently written in a language they spoke?
(hide spoiler)]What a novel concept.
I will forever cringe at the name Cassandra Khaw, something a horror story writer could take as a compliment; interestingly enough, the only scary, dread inducing element in this book was the writing. Mention Cassandra Khaw's similes lightly and I promise I'll shit my pants.
Rating: really liked it
Be sure to visit Bantering Books to read all my latest reviews.Oh, my eyes! My eyes!
I don’t think I’ll ever unsee the cover for
Nothing But Blackened Teeth. It’s terrifying. The unsettling image of the Japanese ghost bride is the stuff of which nightmares are made, and it will be forever embedded in my mind, gleefully waiting in the wings to haunt me every chance it gets.
Fortunately for my pitifully low fear threshold, the cover was the scariest part of Cassandra Khaw’s Japanese-folklore horror novella. The story creeped me out and grossed me out more than it ever truly scared me.
And I kind of wonder why I liked it so much.
Because Khaw’s prose is over-the-top pretentious and obscure. She uses really big words for the heck of it, words even I do not know, and the story feels annoyingly, eye-rollingly overwritten. Furthermore, Khaw casually tosses about Japanese terminology such as
hitobashira,
yokai, and
gashadokuro but provides neither definitions nor explanatory context for the terms.
Thank goodness for
Google. It saved me from drowning in unfamiliar words.
But for all my frustration with the writing, I can’t deny the fact that I enjoyed Khaw’s novella. At only 125 pages in length,
Nothing But Blackened Teeth is an extremely quick and compelling read. Khaw skillfully builds suspense slowly, and she does a nice job of creating eerie, ghostly atmosphere. The story is fun, too, in that it’s a little bit meta, while also a touch surreal.
And in true horror-story fashion, the ending is shocking, twisted, and horrendously gory. Fans of the genre will be pleased with it, I think.
If
Nothing But Blackened Teeth intrigues you, then by all means give it a try. You may find, as I did, that your like for it outweighs all other irritations.
Keep
Google handy, though. You’re gonna need it.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth publishes October 19th, 2021.My sincerest appreciation to Cassandra Khaw and Nightfire for the physical Advance Review Copy. All opinions included herein are my own. Bantering Books Instagram Twitter Facebook
Rating: really liked it
I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t discourage anyone from reading this book.
In fact, let’s support spec-fic authors of colour and READ THEIR WORK! For all that I didn’t personally enjoy
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I think there will be folks out there who absolutely will, as evidenced by several rave reviews already.
So let’s get right into things. The prose in this novella is ridiculously, outrageously, unapologetically purple.It is EXCESSIVE, y’all.
Part of me admires Khaw for committing so fully to such overindulgence. But overall, I have to be honest and say that I did not enjoy the writing in this novella. Why? For the very reason purple prose sucks: the flowery adjectives and over-the-top metaphors
kept taking me out of the story, detracting more than they contributed. (For example, I thought that the ohaguro-bettari
at the heart of this story—and plastered across its INCREDIBLE cover—was
too metaphorical, amorphous, messy for my tastes, and that goes for her yōkai minions, too. I get that this was probably a deliberate decision on Khaw's part, but it just didn't work for me personally. I'm not really a fan of storylines that devolve into chaos.)
Mind you, these things aren’t bad on their own. I love me an uncommon word, an unconventional turn of phrase. I applaud Khaw’s allergy to cliché; at least, in terms of her actual prose (see discussion of characters below for some qualifications).
But my issue is that it was just too. damn. much. Some of the flowery metaphors and weird words worked beautifully; some of them didn’t—like, at all.
The book thus wavers between 1) a visceral vividness that engages all your senses, and 2) just plain distracting.I think I could’ve given this 3 stars if I’d felt some degree of connection to the characters, but I just didn’t.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth revolves around a friend group defined by their major beef with one another. We are never told explicitly about said beef, however, though it is hammered into you over and over again that they’ve all incestuously been in love or lust with each other at some point in the past, and now they all feel salty about it.
In all,
it’s VERY hard to feel in the loop, and even more impossible to care about what basically amounts to petty squabbling between the friends.Though Khaw’s prose itself wasn’t necessarily cliché, the characters ended up feeling like clichés. The flowery language imbued the book’s characters—and their many messy romantic entanglements—with a sense of
canned melodrama more befitting a cringe-worthy soap opera than supernatural horror novella. The casual rep was great, though. Cat, our narrator, is bisexual and Chinese, raised in Malaysia. Lin is also Chinese. Nadia is part Bengali and part Telegu, Faiz is half-Japanese, and Phillip is white (a fact that the others often rag on, which was pretty freakin’ entertaining).
Indeed, I thought the ending redeemed the novella for me; (view spoiler)
[Phillip’s gory death, Nadia’s return, and everyone making it out alive except the golden boy (hide spoiler)]… That was a nice inversion of tropes.
◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️
Bottom line: Nothing But Blackened Teeth was too decadently purple for me, but I absolutely recommend that you read this creepy story to make that call for yourselves.
Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
The damn hell! These people sucked arse but the creepy story was good!
"Well, shit. Yeah. It’s a giant mansion in the middle of nowhere full of dolls and creepy shit."
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
Rating: really liked it
Not gonna lie, I know nothing about Japanese culture and I didn't even know what an "Heian" era was, (in Japanese culture, it's the period that runs from 795 to 1185),before I started this book. Now I know and I also have learned that Cassandra Khaw is a phenomenal writer!
In a famous haunted mansion from the Heian era, a young couple, for whatever twisted reason, wants to get married. Only a few friends are invited as it's a long trip and let's face it-this kind of thing is not for everyone. All the people here have history with each other, which makes for some interesting dynamics-which takes a back seat when the supernatural action starts up. Will the happy couple be able to get married without a problem? Will any of them escape with their lives? You'll have to read this to find out!
I've long said that the novella is a perfect vehicle for a horror story. It's just long enough to introduce the characters and create feelings towards them, while short enough to keep the tension high and the scares well...scary. All of the that is the case here, and more.
The prose? The prose is purply beautiful at times, while at other times, sharp as a knife. The beauty of the mansion is hidden behind the rot and corruption that have taken over and the way that Khaw describes how that came to be is gorgeous. The imagery is vivid and bright, and I had no problems picturing any of the scenes, while at the same time the sharpness of the prose could be like a knife point. For example: "I hope the house eats you." It doesn't get much sharper than that!
I think I'm going to leave this review at what I've already written. I don't want to give any part of the story away, but I will add that Cassandra Khaw is a force to be reckoned with. I can't wait to read more of her work!
My highest recommendation!
Available October, 2021.
*Thank you to Nightfire and to NetGalley for the e-ARC in exchange for my honest review. This is it!*
Rating: really liked it
Hmm.. I'm not sure how to rate this one. There are A LOT of things I didn't like. There are similes and metaphors in every other sentence and the writing was a bit pretentious. Big words were used for the sole purpose of using big words. The writing and I just didn't connect.
Another thing I could connect with were the characters.. I hated all of them. They all hate each other actually but they're all friends at the same time. I thought this dynamic was poor because it focused a lot on their drama rather than any horror aspects of the book. Keep in mind, this is a novella and most of it was petty drama between the group. We don't really even know why they all hate each other but one thing for sure is that I hate all of them.
Okay, I might be too harsh but I had such high expectations. I mean, look at that cover? That alone gave me promise of a great horror novella but I was disappointed. I just wish we were given more.
Rating: really liked it
Are you familiar with the legends of the Ohaguro-Bettari? She's a Japanese spirt typically known for having no eyes or nose, but her mouth is full of blackened teeth. She's been featured in many legends and there's been a lot of artists who have tried to capture the idea of what she would look like. Many different takes but one thing is consistent, those black teeth.
(I do so love that cover)
This book follows a group of "friends" (and those quotation marks are very much needed) who have traveled to Japan to attend a wedding. As they have taken several ghost hunting trips, one of their friends decides to get them access to a supposedly haunted house, where a ghost bride is said to still remain. What they find there is that classic blackened teeth spirit mentioned above.
I picked this book up when it first came out, seeing the discription and adding it to my to read list. After finishing I went online and was surprised to see that the average was under three stars. This was made even more surprising by seeing that most (though not all) of my friends on here liked it and most of the top reviews are at least fairly positive.
Based on what I've seen there seems to be two major complaints which I will address now, which may be considered a warning to readers who these aspects would annoy.
First: The prose is overwritten. This is very much a "your mileage will vary" sort of thing as I personally loved the writing. I've read another of Khaw's books before (the excellent Hammers on Bone) and both books are written in a style that delights me. The prose is indeed purple, but it flows so well and creates images that at times truly got under my skin. Phrases like the following appealed to me; "Her footsteps frictionless as envy." It's poetic, but obviously not for everyone.
Second: The characters are unlikable. Well this one probably bothers people who feel a need to connect to the characters. I'm not criticizing anyone who feels that way, and indeed I too have disliked books partially for this reason. Characters need to be either likable or interesting… and while these ones were certainly not likable, they did interest me. These are people who are knowledgeable about the very tropes of the genre they have walked into. They know the rules, if not the exact stories, and they try to both play by them and deconstruct them.
All in all, I found this a delightful little haunted house story. It's subtilty unnerving while never getting to horrific in my opinion, but it was a delight to read. There's also a delightful little aspect that I may be reading into, but if I'm correct puts a lovely little spin on the story… but spoilers are very much a part of it.
(view spoiler)
[So, every early Ohaguro-Bettari story I can find presents her as frightening, but more of a trickster. She scares people but never actually harms them… and in this book too, she never physically harms others. In fact, she is clearly having fun tormenting them. It's a dark scary trick she plays, and the aftermath involves friends killing one of their own, but had they run like you're supposed to in her stories… would all have been fine? Would they have found their friend safe outside? We and the characters will never know. (hide spoiler)]4/5 stars and recommended for all horror fans not bothered by the above issues.
Rating: really liked it
TW: gore, body horror
Maybe it’s odd to say that this novella was a wonderful treat given its content, but let’s be honest here. It was a wonderful treat. The writing was gorgeous and I truly felt like I was in the story. The beginning confusion of the dynamics of the friend group slowly being unraveled as the story gets darker and darker was easily my favorite part. I can’t even begin to explain how I felt. And then the ending was just the cherry on top. Just the right amount of shock and blood. Amazing.
*Thank you to the publisher for sending me an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review
