Fantastic collection of folklore, well put together and a great place to start finding new anuthors for me, but also to learn about folklore of different cultures, great stuff

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This is a stellar collection of essays from Asian women in horror. Their personal connection to these beings and how they have been integrated into their childhood and adult lives comes through each essay and resonates with the reader. The patriarchy is wrapped tightly around every incarnation of ghosts and spirits, how they are made, and the actions they must take in this new form.

These authors also take a look at how specifically they can relate to these spirits and how they create stories around them, based not only on their on experiences but those of the women (mothers, aunts, and grandmothers) who are closest to them and who theybgrew up hearing about. Using their familial history and cultural connections adds layers as you move from one essay to the next, seeing how these very same ghosts show up in their very modern and at times removed existences within the societies in which they now live and work.

First, I'll start off saying that I love anthologies. It's a nice way to discover new authors and stories from different cultures. This is a horror anthology book. Thats what caught my attention. I can honestly say that this book did not disappointed. The tropes for the stories range from vampires., ghost, urban legends and other fantasy entries. an incredible collection of stories that fuse well together. I discovered new authors and uniquely weird stories. I enjoyed my journey with this book, and I think it's a must read for horror fans.

Disclaimer: Thank you NetGalley and Black Spot Books for a copy of this book and I am leaving this book voluntarily.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Black Spot Books for the advance copy of this stunning collection of essays! I was so happy to get to experience the delving into the experience of the Asian women whose minds were picked for these horror reflections. It shows how alike some of our histories can be, but also the immense weight of how different they have been and still are treated. All of this being wrapped up in my favorite genre was an amazing way to present these stories. It was so easy to get into the mindset of the writers and follow along with their specific journeys.

These essays contain myths and legends such as the White Lady, and more Asian folklore like fox spirits. No matter which one-- the writers would weave in their personality and upbringing, making each story a unique beast. Some are formal, others written like a letter to a friend. The prose keeps things flowing in a beautiful way that really sends the heavy topics home. Behind the fictional monsters are ever-present behemoths like struggling with trauma, coming of age, and societal and familial expectations. These things shaped all of the women included here, and their hearts bleed onto the page... opening long-closed scars to share with the readers.

Though I cannot fully relate to the lives of the writers of these essays-- the issues they spoke on are universal. I think this is a must-read, not just for horror fans, but for those that are trying to gain insight on cultures that are different than their own. If we listened to more of these stories, the world would be a much kinder and pleasant place. I really respect the editor of this book for getting this group together, and I very much enjoyed hearing all of their voices and finding common ground between us. I hope to read more novels like this one in the future.

A beautiful collection, not only exploring the folklore but exploring being removed from your culture. Fantastically put together and a great place to start learning about folklore so rarely considered in the West.

Contained in this book are twenty-two essays written by Asian women from the world of literary horror. Authors and poets, these women write the realities of their own lives as beautifully as any fiction.

While the essays tend to relate back in some way to the ghosts, spirits, and monsters of Asian folklore (which are fascinating enough to read about on their own), the heart of these writings, the truly relatable horrors held within, are those of searching for identity, of struggling against both familial expectations and a society which scores those ideals. Here are women weighted down with the task of honoring centuries-old traditions while living in a modern world. Here are women caught between two cultures, trying desperately to hold themselves together while being pulled in opposite directions.

I cannot relate, personally, to being a child of two opposing cultures. However, I can, and did, while reading, relate to the hardships faced just by being a woman in a world which tells women they should be one thing or another, or all things to everyone, without ever considering or honoring who that woman is as herself and not as a daughter, sister, wife, mother.

These essays are both fascinating and heartbreaking. I think all women will find them achingly relatable, and men might just catch a glimpse into what it is to grow up female.

I was a me thing not the book. I tried many times to read this book I liked what i read but its not for me right now. Perhaps when when the book is available for purchase I'll definitely buy it and try again. I'm sorry.

Thank you for the ARC Netgalley!

I really tried with this one, I dnf'd and restarted 3 times, but I have to say I found this extremely tough to read and can't see how a general fantasy reader could easily enjoy this book.
It's mainly the constant references in parenthesis that really broke the flow of the stories and made it a bit too tedious to read.
I'm gonna give it another go in a bit, see if my perspective changes, but for now I'll leave this at 2 stars.

I'm going to blame this DNF entirely on myself. For some reason, I believed this to be a horror collection by Asian women. The word "essays" in the title didn't click. This is a collection of non-fiction essays by horror writers and its very academic.

While I'm sure this is important and would be a wonderful resource for students its just not what I was expecting (again, entirely my own fault).

Rating it 3 stars because I can't not give it a rating..

I received a digital advance copy of Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror (Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, editors) via NetGalley. Unquiet Spirits is scheduled for release on February 14, 2023.

Unquiet Spirits is a collection of 21 essays that explore identity, duty, loss, and empowerment through the lens of Asian women and their association with the supernatural and story. Based on the title, I was expecting all of the essays to focus on Asian women in horror stories. While some of the essays did have this focus, the unifying thread was that the women writing the essays are also writers of horror. Many of the essays in this collection barely brush against horror, instead focusing on other elements of their lives as Asian women. Despite not being quite what I expected, this collection offered insight on being a woman, being Asian, and putting your personal fears into your fiction.

Overall, Unquiet Spirits is an exploration of myth and story from the point of view of Asian women. I recommend it to readers who enjoy horror or seeing behind the scenes of what feeds into our stories.

Unquiet Spirits is a wonderful collection of essays. We read from various Asian women authors and the relation/spirit of each writers horror story to that of their life.

📖The stories symbolism range from tradition, trauma to womanhood. Providing a glimpse to their inner workings and development of the stories.

If you enjoy reading about Asian folklore and ghost/horror stories, this one is for you.

Thank you Black Spot Books Nonfiction for the opportunity to read an ARC of Unquiet Spirits in exchange for my honest review. All the opinions that follow are my own.

A delightful surprise! This book was not what I expected, it was so much more! Each story was so beautifully told. I do not normally read non fiction, but I really enjoyed trying something new (call me a convert).

A beautiful mix of myths - I can't wait to get my own hard copy. The Substitute was a clear favourite for me as it was a beautiful literary analysis.

This was actually really interesting book. I have been moving more towards mythology and Chinese culture so when this book popped up I was absolutely invested in reading it. I actually really enjoyed this book. I think. Somethings I didn’t understand and I was a little bit confused on, but it pulled me in and the word flowed so well together. It felt like harmony and lyrics, but in a book, it was frightening and adventurous, and there was ups and downs and pulled at your heart strings. Would highly recommend.

Unquiet Spirits is an important book for broadening and diversifying discussions about gender and race in today's politics. Exploration of local supernatural and ghost stories to describe the history of women's oppression and the current status of women's rights and liberation in Asia is not only an interesting choice, but also an effective tool in emphasizing the importance of personal narratives in enriching our understanding of the experiences of Asian women in the diaspora. Although some essays veered away from ghost stories and instead focused on folklore, myth, and religion, the collection remained true to its goal of painting a clear picture of what it means to be a woman of Asian descent, including their suffering, obligations, frustrations, motivations, and longings.

The best essays in this collection are those that perfectly balance history, trivia, memoir, and literary analysis. Some of my favorites are Yi Izzy Yu's The Substitute, Ai Jiang's The Unvoiced, The Unheard, The Unknown, The Unquiet, Benebell Wen's Ghost Month in Taiwan, and Vanessa Fogg's Hungry Ghosts in America. Those that didn't stand out to me were those that lacked cohesion or failed to meet the definition of a messay.

I also appreciated how the essays were organized and how that choice connected each essay with the goal of demonstrating that Asian horror stories share common themes and are frequently cautionary tales about discrimination and violence against women. Thus, despite having few unremarkable essays, Lisa Kröger, who wrote the foreword, was completely right that each and every essay in this book is important—no word is wasted.

In Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women, edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, twenty-one Asian writers (all women as one might have guessed from the title) offer up a single personal essay each that both explore their heritage of ghost stories/folklore and chart their own experiences navigating the in-between world of shared cultures. Like many collections, it’s a mixed bag. For me, the collection as a whole didn’t wholly succeed, though it contains several strong essays. My guess, however, is that one’s personal identity and experiences will make this very much a your-mileage-may-vary type of book.

The stories cover a wide geographic and cultural range, including but not limited to Thailand, China, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and with most of the writers evoking a mixed heritage, so that their experiences are even more richly diverse. The same holds true for the various spirits of the title: hungry ghosts, substitute ghosts (tsigui), fox demons, kwee kia (a “creature made from the spirit of a deceased human fetus … usually the size of a toddler, with a large head, red or black clouded eyes, pointed ears, fanged teeth, long nails, and green or grey skin”) and others.

Many of the ghosts in the stories are women. Women who, as Rena Mason writes, “had been good girls, good women, good sisters, wives and mothers who had done everything right in life. Then a random tragedy would befall them, causing them to become angry, vengeful, frightening — turn evil.” They’re meant, therefore, often as cautionary tales for those women who might be tempted to stray from their traditional roles or to break their expected silence. One of my favorite elements of the collection, though, is how several of the essay turn this reading on its head, do not encode the “hungry female” as evil or the man who “got rid of it” as the hero.

Along with a feminist reading of the traditional tales, approached not through the lens of critical theory but personal musing (the tone in these essays is much more conversational than academic), many of the writers make connections as well between the wandering, liminal nature of ghosts, and their own experiences inhabiting a space between two cultures as well as how “immigrants understand the deep truth of reincarnation better than anyone, understand the sheer number of lives we can live within the span of a single one,” as Yi Izzy Yu puts it. Several as well note how any haunting serves as a metaphor for the long reach of trauma.

In terms of the big picture for why the collection as a whole didn’t feel a complete success to me, for one, I thought the collection suffered from too many essays in that it began to feel somewhat repetitive in nature, which is why I strongly recommend reading the anthology over time rather than in one to three sittings. In addition, some of the essay felt they weren’t saying anything new about the experience of being an other, an immigrant, a woman in a patriarchal world, a person of several cultures, etc. It’s not that there is nothing of value in these; it’s just that they didn’t feel fresh or particularly insightful. Finally, the language often felt a bit flat, as if the writers had sanded off their fictional flairs of style and vocabular and structure to “better fit” the non-fiction expectations.

That said, as noted in the intro, I did find several of the essays to be standouts in the collection. Yvette Tan’s “Fallen Leaves, New Soil” was one, along with Gabriela Lee’s “Sightings.” My favorite by far though was Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito’s “Belonging to Fear”, which I’d say was the most vivid and also the most individualistic of all the essays. It ranges wide in topic, has the most stylistic “oomph”, brings to life the “character” of her Popo, offers the strongest sense of unique voice in the collection, and its concluding paragraphs at the end pack an emotional wallop. Even if you find yourself reluctant to finish the book, I highly recommend skipping to this essay and giving it a read.

As mentioned, I confess to being disappointed in the book as a whole, but it’s a “soft” disappointment in that also as noted, there’s always something of value in each of the essays even if I found myself wishing for stronger writing and more individuality. But also as I noted at the outset, while I can relate to some elements more personally, and also learn something from all of them, one’s own identity and experience might create an entirely different response, more so than is the case with fiction. So if the topic is of interest, I’d say give the book a shot, maybe starting with the ones I highlighted and then an essay or two at a time, working your way through at your leisure.

Not sure what I was expecting from this, but it wasn't quite what I got. Nonetheless, this was an interesting collection of essays about the experiences of Asian women from a variety of different cultures and diasporas, and about the ghost stories they related to. It felt a little like it was trying to be several things at once - I would happily have read a book of ghost stories, or a book about the experiences of Asian women, or a book about the different kinds of ghosts in different cultures, but this was too short a book to be all of those at the same time. I found it very interesting, regardless!

Unquiet Spirits is a fascinating collection of essays from Asian women, looking at identity and the Asian Diaspora, and how it ties into horror and myth. The essays are a mix of styles, with some feeling casual and some more academic. Unfortunately I only got to start this one, not realizing the archive date was several months before the publication date, but I really enjoyed what I read. I'll likely buy a copy when it releases so I can finish it.

3.5
Like another reviewer, I think I misunderstood the blurb of this one. I'd expected a collection of essays discussing how the female spirits have changed in Asian horror. Instead this is a collection detailing how the impacts of spirits in horror have shaped these women's lives.

Stepping away from my initial expectations, this is a thought provoking collection that covers areas of multiple identities that many readers may not have considered before. The standout essays for me effortlessly wove the historical horror with their own family's decisions and their beliefs now in a way that made me contemplate how our earliest beliefs shape our thought processes as adults.

Curiously enough, I was reading Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao alongside this and the two paired remarkably well - highlighting the cultural impacts of these legends, while also showing the modern day interpretations.

As the legends covered in this collection are so wide spanning, I feel like we could have benefited from a glossary of what to research for context to really get the most out of this book before reading it and I'd be interested to see how my thoughts on the book might develop once I understand more of the ghosts mentioned.

I went into Unquiet Spirits blind and with no idea what to expect. Is this an anthology of horror stories? A series of interviews with authors? Literary criticism, or a mix of all of these? But after reading, I found that it is *all* these things, which made the collection more haunting and beautiful. I enjoyed it, but found myself especially drawn to the essay by Ai Jiang.