Brings a whole new meaning to the word unsettling: a review of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts

From the blurb, I expected a trippy ghost story about grief and the environment, which isn't an inaccurate way to describe this book, but The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is so much more than your typical gothic horror novel.

There's a lot I can dig into in this review, but I'll start by saying this book might be the best story about the aftermath of COVID that I've ever read (so far). It's technically not a book specifically about the pandemic. COVID19 just gets mentioned in passing a number of times in a way that is extremely realistic and extremely intentional, treating the pandemic as a collective and ongoing trauma that nobody has fully managed to reckon with. We've all been expected to move on as if society as we know it hasn't fundamentally changed forever, which exposes what this book is really about: reckoning with -- or failing to reckon with -- our fears and our traumas. The story deals with the trauma of the pandemic and resulting isolation. It also deals with a whole host of other traumas: sexual, environmental, financial, work-related, and -- most especially -- grief over a loved one, the story's entire premise being that our protagonist, Eleanor, uses the meager inheritance she got from her recently-deceased mother to make an ill-advised purchase of a home that might look sturdy at first, but is actually falling apart.

Though about grief, the story is not a sad one, not exactly. You might get emotional in a scene or two, especially at the end, but the point of the book is not to make you cry. It's to interact with questions related to contemporary life. Some of the questions raised might deal with painful topics like grief, trauma, and fear. Other topics are less heavy. The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is just as concerned with death as it is with the role of technology in shaping our understanding of loss. What can and can't this technology do for us? How does it connect us? How does it separate us? What other things separate us? Do these divisions sometimes keep us safe? Is safety more of an illusion than we think it is? How might we be fooling ourselves into thinking everything is fine when it's not? Is there anything we can do when the world seems like it's falling apart? What collective and individual actions can we take? What actions can't we take? What is it like to grow up in a world that has normalized so many problems? What is it like to grow up in general? It might seem overly ambitious, but it never feels that way. It just reads like a scary book about modern life. Because modern life can be overwhelming, a whole lot of questions need to be addressed, and they are, all in a very thoughtful way.

All of these topics are handled by an author who is clearly very smart, who deeply understands when and why fear might cause a person's thoughts to slide away from something important. Eleanor is a flawed character, but also so real. I totally bought that she wouldn't be able to read bank statements without her brain stuttering, that she would barely blink twice when her mother starts haunting her, that she would think it's reasonable to choose a very isolated and independent existence (despite the fact that she's lived an incredibly dependent life), and that she would make every dumb decision that she makes over the course of the book, even though she's ostensibly a rather intelligent person. She has the energy of an overwhelmed woman who isn't ready to be an adult, and most people in their twenties and thirties should be able to empathize hard.

I haven't even gotten around to gushing about my favorite part of the book, which is the setting. Sometimes a ghost story will have a setting that feels so alive that it's basically a character of its own. Kim Fu does the opposite. The atmosphere feels dead and stagnant, but deliberately so, making it all the more frightening. Imagine a valley that has been razed of all trees in order to construct an entire neighborhood. Now imagine that only two houses ever got built, both of them right next to each other, while the rest of the valley remains an unfinished and unbuilt wasteland, where nature might one day creep back in, but that process is only just starting. That valley is where this story takes place. It's stark, isolating, disorienting, and liminal. It's unsettled and unsettling. The roads are unreliable. The neighbors are nonexistent. The rain hardly stops. The WiFi is spotty. The house where Eleanor lives, with the constant need for costly repairs, seems to come straight out of the average millennial's stress dreams about the impossibility of home ownership.

It's actually even weirder and more nightmarish than I'm making it out to be, but no description I give here can fully do it justice. Only Fu's rhythmic and lyrical prose can truly capture this atmosphere. They write in a way that is precise (but without losing the sense of expansive spectacle), efficient (but without being clipped or pedestrian), and vivid (but without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail). They keep the pace moving and the length short, but they also linger in important moments, allowing you to take a second to slow down and to appreciate how much mastery they have over the English language. There wasn't a single chapter in this book when my jaw wasn't fully on the floor at least once.