TITLE: Nothing but Blackened Teeth
AUTHOR: Cassandra Khaw
128 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250759412 (hardcover, also in e-book and audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from the publisher): 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.

MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: Cassandra Khaw’s novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth is lushy written, full of physical and sensory detail. The horror starts out subtle – just a whisper the narrator thinks she hears – and by the time it turns obvious the reader knows more about the characters involved than they probably realize about themselves.

Narrator Cat is unsure of her place in a group of friends she used to lead, back when they were a sort of “Scooby gang” investigating haunted houses, abandoned hospitals, and any sewage pipe large enough for a body to crawl down. She’s been absent from the group for several months, working on her own problems, and has been drawn out to attend a wedding of two other members of the group (Faiz and Nadia) organized by a fourth member (Philip). There’s some question about whether the fifth member of their group, Lin, is even going to show up. There are a lot of dynamics at play here: the characters either seem to like each other too much or not at all, and their interpersonal histories turn out to be easy for the ghost haunting the house to use to her own ends. I must admit, I didn’t find any of these characters particularly likeable. They’ve all treated each other badly in the past and in the present. But I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to like everyone – or even anyone – in a horror story. I enjoyed watching their personal issues play out against a growing sense that the evening spent in this house is not going to turn out well for some, if not all, of them.

The house itself is just as much of a character as the group of friends renting it, and Khaw’s descriptions of the rooms the characters move through are at turns beautiful and disturbing, especially as the actual threat – the ghostly bride and those that surround her – become more apparent. At points, the mansion reminded me of the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: hidden depths, extra hallways and rooms that endlessly loop on each other, that aren’t discovered unless an occupant makes just the right turn at just the right time, none of which are visible from the mundane exterior of the building.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a fast-moving but deeply immersive reading experience in which a group of unhappy people barrel blindly towards an overwhelming supernatural presence. To say too much more would be to spoil the twists the story takes.

The plot is as superficial as a horror movie, and horror movie fans will enjoy the many nods to the genre tropes. Khaw's style is eccentric, and the number of f-bombs is too realistic (nearly every sentence).

This is a quick and interesting read. Khaw does a good job of building suspense, but ultimately I think the writing gets in the way of the story. Horror novels need to be descriptive in order to give us the imagery and set the tone that's supposed to scare us. Khaw does a great job initially of establishing a spooky environment filled with tension, but this quickly became bogged down by the petty interpersonal arguments between the group. The prose are also excessive and pretentious to the point were its difficult to get through a paragraph without a dictionary. She uses a lot of Japanese terms as descriptors without offering any explanation as to what they mean, I found myself constantly having to look things up to understand what was happening, which took me out of the story. The conversations between characters become very "meta" leading up to the climax. they're constantly predicting what's about to happen because "its what always happens in horror stories". Because of this, when the climax actually happens, there's no element of surprise. Its certainly gory, but the characters had just discussed how it was about to happen so I wasn't shocked or scared.

nightmares for the rest of my life. seriously. the scariest book. why would you have your wedding in a haunted house? quick read, but so so terrifying!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to read and review this title! Honestly, it just wasn't for me but it may be a great choice for someone else.

By far my least favorite book by Cassandra Khaw.

Cassandra Khaw is clearly a master of prose, they know how sow a gutpunch to the heart. This story is woven tightly, visceral done to the bone-I'd prefer it deeper. My qualms, I guess, start with the lack of connection with the characters. It didn't do it for me, and I truly love every other work of theirs but NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH came out short, missed its mark, has a loose strings of characters, and most unfortunate of all, it's not scary (but this could just be me AHHH)

By far, it's not a bad book. I enjoyed it, of course, this is Cassandra Khaw we're talking about. But like?? I felt nothing for these characters. And I like a bit of nasty and mean and realistically, stupid in characters. Yet, I felt nothing but apathy for these characters. For how little I got to perceive the characters truly suffered in my enjoyment.

I won't completely blame the book for not horrifying me, I have been reading more horror after all. Though, I will say that this does seem like Cassandra Khaw's least horrifying story (excluding all their non-horror stories ofc). It was nicely described and definitely hooked me like I usually am in their stories, but it didn't hit. It felt like pretty language but going nowhere. :/ Not to mention how comical I found the reactions of these characters to the horror and how they just screamed at each other in a room while the horrors danced around them-the latter could've slapped tbh but alas it did not and made me feel awkward.

This one seems to be the bad apple for me. Don't let that discourge you, and I do highly reccomend their other stories!

The writing in this novella is absolutely surreal. It's been a while since I've actually had to struggle and pay attention to the words on the page, because that's how inventive and unique the writing is. Having said this, the story itself was just okay. I am fascinated by Japanese culture, which is why I picked this up from Netgalley who provided a free copy. However, outside the fascinating descriptions and the use of Japanese phrases, it really felt like something was missing. I really didn't understand the lead's conflict with herself and the others in the group. That, I'm pretty much every character was a complete asshole. So yeah, I wasn't too big on the characters and I think it hurts the ending just a bit.

Otherwise, it's a quick read and I don't regret reading it..

This is one of those books that will sit with you long after you shut the book and put it back on the shelf. It took me a while to come back and rate this one because I just had so many thoughts that I needed to sit on, but from a readers advisory stance, this is a book that I would recommend to almost any horror reader -- in fact I have already put many copies of this books in horror readers hands and so far they've all agreed: just WOW

DNF'd after the first 30 pages. Just couldn't get into this one. 2 Star, Thank you Net Galley for sending me an arc of this title. I think the audiobook for this one may be a better reading experience given the genre and subject matter.

i’ve been hyping up nothing but blackened teeth since it’s been announced and maybe my expectations were simply too high, because i was not impressed. i feel like this story would’ve worked so much better as a full lenght novel instead of a novella – it simply attempted to do too much and it didn’t really work.

i’ve seen people complain about the prose and while it’s undoubtedly purple, i think it’s on purpose and it works very well with the story. it’s over-the-top and flowery to a fault, but it didn’t bother me that much as it added an extra layer of “what the fuck is going on” – in my humble opinion.

the characters were walking cliches and i loved how they were aware of it. the novel doesn’t take itself too serious and actually points out when it’s the time for some of the characters to die – if they were in a horror movie. the drama surrounding all of the characters was pretty vague and i am still confused as to what happened between a bunch of them. unfortunately, the melodramatic aspects of their friendship were more in focus than the horror plot – which i really hated, because i came here for the ghosts and only the ghosts.

i feel like this novella lacks the horror – the ghost plays a very small part and i truly wished it tried more to build the suspense, to actually scare the reader. the story is borderline comedic instead of scary.

the ending came out of nowhere – it was so abrupt. it didn’t really explain anything properly, we didn’t get more info on the characters and why they hated each other so much while they kept calling themselves friends. we’re also kept in the dark regarding the main character’s past and while the book hints at her having a breakdown – it’s never addressed or explained. even though another character blames themselves for it, i didn’t really get the connection.

cassandra khaw definitely knows how to write an atmospheric setting, but it didn’t really translate well in the novella. i wished she took the story and turned it into a novel – because it needs more background, more explaining of the dynamics between these characters and more focus on the horror scenes.

content warnings:

death, gore, blood, body horror, murder

Khaw's writing at the sentence level is absolutely astounding. Listening to the audiobook felt like listening to music with how well each word flowed into the next, using rhythm and changes in structure to add to the atmosphere. The prose is always my favorite about a Khaw story.

However, I couldn't help thinking "how did we get into this mess?" over and over. None of the characters seem to like each other and there's not a very good explanation as to why. The whole group is miserable. It's also hilariously self-aware as Kat and Lin bring up the horror tropes that the story is falling into, almost breaking the fourth wall to be like "look, look! this is what should happen next."

The ending felt a little lackluster, though. As the horror dissolves and we get a fade to black and then skip ahead to a future where all the horror can simply be waved away. It was disappointing.

Overwritten (and sorely underdeveloped), but imaginatively so, in a way that read as earnestly MFA: this author clearly has an interest in the layers of language and a knack for cultivating surprising imagery, but the effect only works half the time, teetering between “refreshing way to look at X”
and “improper use of the thesaurus.”

The main issue is that I didn’t find much believable: not the plot, not the characters, their choices, or the words they said to each other. Much of the movement throughout felt unearned: the plot, as I said, is run through with glaring holes as a pin cushion and the characters act like strangers, but tell us (without showing us) that they’re incredibly close. And yet, the ending (sudden, rushed, and oddly emotionless) is somehow rendered entirely without emotion.

It felt maybe one or two degrees of separation of a novella that straddled genre and lit fic. All this said, it wasn’t terribly disappointing and the body horror elements show real promise for the author’s future works.

I was provided an ARC of this book via Netgalley, however I did end up listening to the final published copy of the audiobook. This book is fairly short regardless of the medium you choose to consume it in, the audiobook is around 2.5 hours and the book comes in around 130 pages depending on the edition. I enjoyed the narrator, I thought she did a good job with this creepy story.

Because this is on the shorter side, we don't get alot of background information on the characters or the lore connected with the story itself. I was drawn to read this because it was supposed to be "steeped in Japanese folklore", which having read some other books recently about that subject it is really fascinating. This doesn't go into much detail on the lore. I felt like you had to go in either understanding the lore or not wanting alot of detail on what a Yokai are and what their significance are to the story.

This follows a group of friends as they gather in a creepy old mansion for a destination wedding. The bride apparently always wanted to get married in a haunted house, and we all know brides get the weddings of their dreams, right? Well in this case she does because on of the members of the party is disgustingly wealthy and rents the mansion for the wedding. The mansion has a creepy ghost story attached to it about it's own tragic bride to be. The ghost story is actually why they picked the mansion because the "destination" part of the wedding is ghost hunting. As you can imagine things kind of start to go south as the house has it's own agenda and starts to inject terrifying things into what they thought was going to be a happy occasion. I won't spoil the rest.

I think if you liked The Haunting of Hill House, you might like this. It is more descriptive when it comes to the gore and entities. I thought it was entertaining enough, but something was missing for me. I think I wanted more, but because this was more of a novella length book we didn't get all of the details we would have in a full length novel.

Wonderful, subversive queer roots. Fun, and so cinematic. On a purely technical level, Khaw is one of the only authors you can flip to any page, blindly point to a sentence and find the most remarkable line of prose you’ve ever encountered in your life.

I read this back in October and it was absolutely perfect for the spooky season. I really enjoyed learning lore from another culture, particularly in this type of setting - a haunted house! The characters were well developed and believable. I was frustrated with a few of them based off choices they made but I feel like I was supposed to be. If you're looking for a fresh, original concept in horror, this is it!

A short and delightfully horrifying read. This author is a must-read for me and doesn't disappoint with this novella. Great for anyone who loves folklore, magical realism, travel, thrillers, and interesting interpersonal relationships in horror novels.

DNF’d at 30% .... really was confused the characters and their relationship dynamics were really flat to me and did not engage me enough in the story .... felt almost like a watt pad situation where i should know the characters beforehand to appreciate it ! if i had gotten any scare in that 30% i did read i would’ve finished but too much build up that i didn’t enjoy and want to deal w to be scared lol sorry if too harsh one day maybe i’ll give it another chance because i really wanted to like it bc the concept is so fun

thank u to the publisher and netgalley for access to the e arc !!!

Unfortunately, this was just not for me. I enjoyed the writing but I wish it would've been a tad longer. I really wanted more depth to the story and I wanted to see more of the characters develop and grow.

Um…I liked it? I liked the first two acts more than the third. But, it’s a haunted house, so always extra points in my book. It has some flowery language that teeters on pretension, but keeps it together. No Toni Morrison, but worth the read. A real creep fest. Not much to chew on, but a fun little dark ride in a park full of thrill coasters.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for this ARC, in exchange for my honest review.
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There are books that are good, and there are books that are great. This is a book that is great. The fact that it is under 150 pages made it even more great.

Not only did I inhale this in one sitting, but I felt like I was being inhaled by the story. The language, the descriptions, everything sucked me in. Nothing But Blackened Teeth felt like poetry wrapped in a horror story.

This book combines real aspects of feuding friends, mental health issues, and century old spirits for a wonderfully perfect story.