Incredible. A riveting horror novella from author Cassandra Khaw, I inhaled this book in one sitting. Not only is this perfectly paced, but Nothing But Blackened Teeth is clever, imaginative, and terrifying. Khaw perfectly balances & weaves in meta, horror tropes into this & her writing pulls you into this horror home in Japan with clawed hands. I particularly appreciated Khaw's deep knowledge of Japanese folklore, which bleeds so beautifully into the page.

I cannot wait for others to read this one & am in love with the cover too - an image I terrifyingly held with me while I read.

Post incoming on https://www.instagram.com/bookedwithemma - I hope to receive a hard copy from Tor Nightfire so I can continue to rave about this one all year.

Fractured friendships, mental health concerns, how both humans and ghosts fall into old patterns of behavior even as those patterns keep them in very unhealthy places, all spiced with a terrifying dollop of this-can't-be-happening horror.

:chefs kiss:

"We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lips of a bride drowning on soil."

Wow. Where to start? Perhaps I would begin with the most uncanny and supernatural element of all, which is how this was read by anyone - let alone the luminaries in the list of advance praise - past the first page. "Nothing But Blackened Teeth" is a nigh-incomprehensible jumble of protean elements, any of which by themselves would have carried a short story, but combined are no less than tedium defined. Other reviewers have called the story immersive, whereas I found myself consistently ejected from the flow of the story. The main reason was the florid prose. On its. own, the descriptive style might have worked in an experimental text, but to have it chopped up in the middle of almost every paragraph by juvenile dialogue and nonsensical metaphors made for a wretched reading experience. I found myself embarrassed to the point of having to put the book down at the frequent malapropisms, e.g., "ambergris" cited as a color, when, in fact, the substance ambergris is a dull yellowish gray, a scent rather than a color. I'm pretty sure the writer believes it's simply a fancier "amber." The narrator's witticisms ("Media's all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we're all just sheep") fell flat and broke the fourth wall, demonstrating that they were merely a function of the writer showing off a cute turn of phrase rather than offering anything that advanced the narrative or gave insight into the main character's mindset. The purple writing, laden with questionable similes, was interspersed with dialogue from a seventh-grade play, or a seventh-grader's interpretation of a horror film. A few well-placed "fucks" have impact; a few in every line of dialogue pulls the rug out from underneath suspension of disbelief. The plot, when I could follow it through the convoluted language and simplistic emotion, ended up a waste of a rich setting. Where it should have been evocative, what I got out of this mercifully short piece was that an author was eager to show off the contents of their thesaurus, their capacity for research into Japanese folklore, and their painfully callow outlook. The frequent winks to horror convention and tropes might have worked had they not been thrown scattershot into awkward dialogue...shall I say "like pin-pulled grenades of somnolent overreach, poised to douse surrounding paragraphs with hackneyed ichor?" No, I didn't write the book, believe it or not. At the end, I didn't care about any of the characters or their fates. I merely found myself, much like the buried brides evoked by the author, praying it would all be over soon.

I hate to say that something is too smart to read, but there are times where I find some text to be too layered, too filled with similes or metaphors, too trapped inside the narrator's head that I have difficulty connecting and staying engaged. This novel borders on that almost too much at times.

Other times I'm sucked into the brutal reality of the characters here. Their friendships hit familiar notes. Secrets that you've always kept. Acceptance of a person for someone else's benefit. Someone's friendship that may have outlived its connection. In these moments this novel truly shines and it's why it kept me going.

Thankfully as the book goes on, we get more of the latter. Early on I felt dragged out of the story too much, but by the middle, I was finally pulled into the tale in glorious fashion.

It's certainly not for the faint of heart, and may benefit from a little internet searching if unfamiliar with some of the ghosts and fables tied into it, but the end result is satisfying in its brutal depictions of horror and life.