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language: English
country: Malaysia
year: 2021
form: novel
genre(s): horror, fantasy
dates read: 8.5.23-9.5.23
Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing but Blackened Teeth has some lovely horror prose. it’s fast-paced, suitably gory, and contra all the negative Storygraph reviews I actually thought the characters and relationships were quite well-drawn considering the length and pace of the book. a group of friends(?) with substantial personal and interpersonal baggage rent a Heian-era mansion in Japan that’s rumored to be haunted, because one of them wants to have her wedding in a haunted house and her fiancé is apparently willing to oblige. unfortunately, it’s a haunted house, and the being(s) haunting it won’t let them all leave alive.
in spite of its strengths, though, I found it a bit insubstantial — the narrator, Cat, always felt like she was at a distance from what was happening even when it was supposed to be visceral (literally or figuratively); it never quite seemed to touch her, and so some of the most important beats of the novel didn’t land the way they were intended to. I enjoyed it, but in some ways the horror felt like an afterthought to the character dynamics — something expected rather than something integral, somehow. the characters were great, but because of this the ways the horror affected them felt just a little off.
something about the Japanese setting also didn’t quite land — I think the litany of yōkai felt like a performance of knowledge-about-Japan rather than like the presence of all these different beings was meaningfully contributing to the atmosphere. I also spent the whole book thinking back to a moment early on when there’s a reference to “a yen store”, presumably by analogy with “a dollar store”, except that that’s…not what they’re called: they’re hundred-yen stores. there was a similar just-slightly-off moment at the end referencing a character going on to “minor” in something at a university in England.
regardless of these, though, I enjoyed this! it’s a very quick read and, while perhaps not earth-shattering, it’s certainly better than the negative reviews portray it as.
moods: dark, grimy, reflective, tense