Tuesday 19 October 2021

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw - Book Review

 


'A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company. It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

'But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart. And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.'

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a spooky new novella from Titan books and author Cassandra Khaw steeped in Japanese mythology that makes its arrival just in time for Halloween.

The story follows five young friends as they travel to a remote mansion ruin deep in rural Japan so that two of the group can be married, one of them having always wanted to get married in a haunted house. There's a few problems though, first of all, none of them really like each other all that much; and you quickly begin to see the cracks in this fragile friendship, a friendship that probably should have ended long before this point. The other, bigger issue, is that the story around the mansion, of the ghostly bride buried alive beneath the foundations who haunts its halls is more than just a story; and now the five of them are going to have to fight to survive the night.

As someone who loves Japanese fiction and mythology I was hugely excited for this story. There's something about Japanese ghost stories that hit so much harder than those we get here in the UK that makes them so much scarier. The imagery is more frightening, there are rules around things like ghosts and yokai, and usually it's people who deserve something awful that happen to be the ones getting haunted to death.

And whilst this book has a lot of this, and there are moments of great tension built up in the descriptions of the environments and the things lurking just out the corner of your eye there's one area I unfortunately felt the book didn't give me enough. The characters. We get titbits about the five people that make up our cast, and very quickly learn the broad strokes of their relationships and how they feel about each other; but as things progress it's clear that these first impressions aren't telling us everything, and that most of these characters are really bad for each other.

We get a few hints as to what's going on, such as one of them having not liked another when she started dating her friend, and thought the relationship should have ended; or how another of the friends had secretly slept with the bride in the past. But for the most part the details aren't really there. Whilst this doesn't really affect the story in any great way, and it's more of what's happening in the mansion whilst they're there that's the most important I really wanted to understand these people more, to see what their issues were and to understand their relationships better. 

I think some of this is down to the fact that this is a novella, and as such there's pretty limited space given over to these in-depth character dives and explanations, and that if the book was longer I'm sure we'd have gotten a lot more of that. What we do get is very intriguing though, and it's clear that Cassandra Khaw can write complex and flawed characters, even if they're going to be characters we only know for a brief while.

Where Khaw really excells, however, is in the atmosphere. A lot of attention is given over to the setting of the book, and very soon the reader gets a good sense of what the old mansion is like. You feel like you're in the hallways yourself, peeking in at these lonely, haunted rooms. There's a sense of pervading darkness and gloom that flows throughout the book, and there were times the descriptions were so vivid and so detailed I felt like I could reach out and touch the crumbling walls and smell the dampness.

The same level of attention to detail is given over to the main star of the book too, the ghost. It's clear Khaw hasn't just replicated the 'standard' Japanese ghost image that most of you would probably think of if asked to imagine one, but has drawn on other sources too; such as the monstrous yokai. The ghost is a figure that's gone beyond what you would expect of a human, taking on a more demonic and twisted form, one that sends chills down your spine and really sticks with you.

Whilst this is a short read, and we don't get a lot of time to know the characters there is a lot to like about this book. The story is chilling in a way that I absolutely loved, and I wanted it to keep on going because I was enjoying it so much. Thanks to this book I'm definitely going to be checking out more of Cassandra Khaw's work.


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