Nothing But Blackened Teeth

Nothing But Horror Tropes & Misplaced Expectations

One of my deepest and longest standing loves has been for the horror genre, ever since I was young enough to read a classic Goosebumps novel or feel the sensation of my skin crawling when reading "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark." As an adult, horror has still been my longest love, with the classic haunted house storyline being one of my personal favorites told repeatedly over time. It can be told in a thousand different ways and still give you that sense of dread that leaves you glancing around at the pale walls of your own home with weary concern.

From "Haunting of Hill House" to "Hell House" and even "Naomi's Room," the haunted house plot can never grow trite and cliche, so long as it's done right and the reader is immersed into the atmosphere along with the characters. But that's the catch -- with a storyline done so many times before, it absolutely must be done right to be scary.

Sadly, "Nothing But Blackened Teeth" missed the mark on this.

Cassandra Khaw created a story that seemed to be every checkbox of haunted house tropes packaged neatly in this grotesquely covered novella. Four lifelong friends, coupled with some romantic rivalries mixed in, rent out an eerie Heian-era mansion for a night of ghost hunting and wedding ceremony. It's a creative take, and one of the things that appeals to a horror audience is the creepy myths and tales that come from the Eastern end of the world.

I mean, twenty years later, and the Grudge still gives me the creeps and unsettles me. And some of the best horror movies and novels I've discovered came from the other end of the world, from a culture I know nothing about but continue to keep me hooked.

That's the problem with this novella, though. It seems to give the impression that we as an audience are expected to know immediately what we're experiencing and seeing in the context of this story. We're supposed to automatically know what yokai and kappa are, the vocabulary used to describe the interior of the mansion, and the cultural influences that hang over the ambience of it all. And that's not the case with many of the readers, I spent a good portion of the time reading this book highlighting words to search up and help myself create a mental image of what was happening. That, sadly, broke the experience of being immersed in the story, and as an author, that's something you don't want to happen when writing a horror novel.

Though this isn't the only issue I had with the story.

The characters are all extremely unlikeable, and even when we're supposed to root for them, or be sad, we're not given the chance to really get to know them. Even the one casualty that occurs at the end seems to come from nowhere but we're not given the chance to be shocked or experience any kind of emotional investment, despite the author's insistence to describing this characters as everyone's best friend and the perfect person.

And then there is the constant fourth-wall breaks or references to horror movies done throughout that felt more comedic than part of a legitimate story, let alone how true characters should talk. "This is the part where we die" and "I'm rich, you're bisexual, we are always the first to die...." this was not as humorous or entertaining as it felt it was intended to be. If anything, that suspension of disbelief was broadened even more, and made it even more difficult to relate to these characters.

I could go on about the cliche horror tools, such as a library in the next room or suddenly there being a book with the instructions on how to stop the ghosts altogether and get their friend back. It felt like an incredibly lazy wrap-up to the story that had a lot of potential in the beginning, but fell flat a third of the way in.

To summarize my review, the idea, the hook, the story altogether had me in a good hold at the beginning, but the momentum died down quickly before the end of the first half, and from there, it just felt like a need to finish since it was such a short book rather than out of enjoyment. There are plenty of high quality haunted house stories out there, some as short as this, if not more, but this would not be one I could recommend.

Hilarity ensues when five deeply unlikeable characters who barely tolerate each other spend the night in a haunted Japanese mansion.

While the prose had its moments, the characters and story were deeply disappointing. I don’t require books to have an appealing viewpoint character, but everyone presented here is obnoxious and tedious, with only thinly veiled contempt for each other. Animosity within a group can work in a longer piece of fiction, where there’s more time to explore both the ties that keep people together and not just the things that irk them about each other (Adam Nevill’s The Ritual), but there’s no room for that in this brief story, and the characters are at each other’s throats even before anything supernatural occurs. Irritating characters that the audience enjoy watching get killed off is a common horror movie trope, but there’s usually at least one appealing character to root for. This story has ZERO, and the body count is also lamentably low.

The Japanese setting details also had issues. The characters stay in a neglected mansion from the Heian period (c. 794-1185), but less than two dozen buildings remain from this era, most of them temples or shrines, and certainly none of them could be described as abandoned. Japan’s climate and seismic activity is unkind to old architecture.

The characters also come across a book with a ritual to solve their problems, but rather than be in the form of a period-appropriate scroll (written in ancient text that nobody but a specialist scholar would be able to read, anyway), it’s a leather-bound vellum book. There are other apparent missteps, and that’s even after ignoring odd details that could possibly have a spooky supernatural rationale.

The author also name-drops several yōkai (spirits/monsters) without elaborating on them for the audience. I speak Japanese and am familiar with the folklore, but this felt a bit ostentatious, like the author was showing off her research. But given the various false notes in the Japan-centric details, I wasn’t much impressed.

I love horror stories and Japan, so I had high hopes for this book. Not only was I crushed by the actual story, I am mystified as to how this had the full marketing might of TOR behind it. How many novellas get a hardcover release and a $20 cover price? The acknowledgements mention support and encouragement from Ellen Datlow, who is an editor that can usually be counted on to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Avoid this one, folks.

You could just about smell the cream on the lip of Phillip's grin, though. I tried not to cringe, to wince, beset by a zoetrope of sudden emotions. I hadn't spoke to Lin since before I checked myself into the hospital for terminal ennui, exhaustion so acute it couldn't be sanitized with sleep, couldn't be remedied by anything but a twist of rope tugged tight. The doctors kept me for six days and then sent me home, pockets stuffed with pills and appointments and placards advocating the commandments of safer living. I spent six months doing the work, a shut-in committed to the betterment of self, university and my study of Japanese literature, both formal and otherwise, shelved, temporarily.

From what I can gather, this is a fairly divisive book among the horror literature circles, and the biggest complaint that I repeatedly see is about the writing and vocabulary. It is packed with more figurative language than you'd expect and has a lot of word choices that feel like someone was either studying for the SAT or just wanted a sponsorship from a thesaurus publisher. There's also a lot of unexplained Japanese words thrown in which might be confusing to anyone who's not at least a level five weeaboo. But it is definitely unique, and I don't think that's a reason to shy away from this book.

At it's core, there's an interesting story at play. Five long-time friends, with a LOT of messy relationship drama between them, have a history of going to haunted places and looking for spooky shit. The guy with the 1% parents manages to rent out an entire abandoned feudal Japanese mansion (and the other characters do comment on just how insane that is, don't worry), and they all gather together as young adults so two of them can get married in this place that was supposedly haunted by a bride whose groom died before he could get to the wedding 1,000 years ago. Predictably, hijinks ensue.

Honestly, the dialogue feels real and flows naturally, and the characters for the most part behave the way you'd expect them to, even when the supernatural stuff starts going down. The prose reads almost like a writing assignment, like someone was given a prompt to write a ghost story and make it as flowery and over-the-top as possible. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because I don't think nearly as many people would have even heard about this book were it not known for being so distinctive.

This book did exactly what it set out to do, and it did it in just the right amount of length. I don't regret giving it my time, and if nothing else I appreciate having a new go-to example of ~purple prose~ in my back pocket to reference on the fly. Don't be scared away by other reviews you might see on this one.

A group of friends go to a haunted mansion for a wedding. The run down, abandoned house is the final resting place of a former would be bride and holds the remains of girls who were buried alive to keep her company.

The cover and synopsis is what pulled me in. The characters and purple prose is what nearly stopped me from finishing. I could not really connect with the writing style. Just because someone knows a lot of words doesn't mean they all need to be crammed in. It reminds me of the way middle grade kids will go back and add as many words as possible to pad out a school report to the required number of paragraphs. I didn't connect with any of the characters. I didn't like any of them and they didn't like each other much either. This was not the terrifying ghost story I was hoping for. You may enjoy it more than I did. I seem to be in the minority of disappointed readers.
I received an advance copy.