To be published in Interzone #294 - January 2023

Over the past few years, there have been two significant anthologies featuring Asian women in horror: the fiction of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women and poetry of Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken. These books have been spearheaded by an unofficial collective of authors, including Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Christina Sng.
Unquiet Spirits is the third offering in this series, and offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what inspires these authors to write horror. Angela Yuriko Smith’s final essay on the Nukekubi offers a more brutal overview: “This collection is our invitation to partake of the meal we have served of ourselves.”
These personal essays skirt the academic and the emotional, tying together family history with mythology, ghost stories, and experiences of the diasporic, cross-continental moves from Asia to the rest of the world. Each author has taken an aspect of spiritual or ghostly mythology from their culture, deconstructed the feminist symbolism, and used it as a metaphor for their experiences. It’s a broad remit, but it works here because of the skill of the authors.
Many of these stories of haunted spirits are cautionary tales for women. Several of the essays talk of a sensation of otherness; what it is to choose differently to family expectations, or to be marginalised as an immigrant in another culture, caught between two worlds. Rena Mason writes, “everyone, somewhere is the other but … some of us are othered no matter where we go.”
While these essays might offer familiarity and reassurance to readers with Asian heritage, there’s a universality to many of the experiences documented here. The authors narrate raw family histories of suicide, domestic abuse, and tragic car accidents, which struck a deep chord with my own personal history of generational trauma. Notable is Yi Izzy Yu’s essay ‘The Substitute’ on her great-aunt’s suicide, and the haunting substitute ghost. As Geneve Flynn writes, ‘What is a haunting but an echo from the past?’ Flynn sees telling stories as a way of exorcising the ghosts that linger, especially those all-consuming hungry ghosts.
So too, the deeply personal. As a childless woman approaching middle-age, I was greatly moved by Kiyomi Appleton Gaines’ essay ‘Plant a cherry tree over my grave’. This work grapples with the expectation of motherhood and the fears that overcome us when we don’t live up to these expectations, cutting so deftly to the heart of the matter, I will be haunted by her conclusion for months to come.
If there’s any criticism of these essays, it’s that some attempt too broad a scope. The ones which work best focus deeply on a narrow topic, while retaining a tight view on the symbolism of the monstrous feminine. Those going in looking for dense academic analysis ought to look elsewhere, but the highlight of this book is its accessibility and readability. In some ways, it reminds me of the oral histories passed down from generation to generation; as a reader, count yourself lucky to partake in listening.

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this collection: Modern horror? Literary criticism? Traditional tales of terror? It intrigued me regardless.

What Unquiet Spirits delivers is a combination of all of the above. It is memoir, criticism, history, and ethnography in balanced fusion. Each chapter is written by an Asian female author and in it she discusses both her own writing, the cultural and historical inspiration for her characters, the origins of some feminine demon, ghost, or creepy -- a unquiet spirit -- which haunts her and the pages she has produced. In some chapters the author draws on a deeper well of literature of the past and ponders the future of the female spirit archetype that is the focus of their chapter.

The books is divided by and devotes its pages equally to feminine spirits across the Asian continent, from East to Southeast to South Asia. I was pleasantly surprised to see such attention given to Southeast Asian spirits and archetypes (my favorite was always the pontianak, the evil spirit of a woman who lurks in the dark under the protection of a banana tree. In my recollection, she can be "pinned" to the tree with a needle or a pin and made to do the pin-holder's bidding. But, beware to that horrid individual if the offending metal is ever removed!)

While the collection examines different demons and feminine archetypes from across a swath of very diverse cultures, it ultimately makes a singular, united appeal to the reader. Their call to action is unmistakable: Asian women, as a whole, alive or dead, demonic or angelic, monstrous or victimized, are powerful beings. Asian women have been too long overlooked in the literary world and deserve more than the whispered, submissive voice they have been too long assigned by Orientalists; hear them shout, scream, screech!

For that reason alone, Unquiet Spirits is worth reading. But there is more.

The authors reveal facets of the Asian feminine that have rarely been visible, that is to Western audiences. To Asian women, we have always known they were there, even when our patriarchal societies told us to ignore them, to castigate them, to revile these demonic women as ill-influences on ourselves and our communities, yet still, Unquiet Spirits is sure to deliver novelties and new knowledge to Asian/Asian American readers.

Stars: 5 out of 5 (Extra extra star for the gorgeous cover)

I don't often read non-fiction unless I need it for work, so I was a bit skeptical when I picked up this book. But that cover drew me in like a magnet, so I decided to give it a try. And I must admit that I didn't regret my choice.

This is a collection of essays by Asian women about their experiences having to reconcile two often different cultures or trying to integrate into a culture that is different then the one they were born into. It's also about the role of women in Asian culture and how powerless they often are. And each essay also talks about some monsters traditional to various Asian cultures and how those monsters are often females.

Yes, summarized like that this book doesn't sound particularly interesting, but trust me, it is. Maybe because being an immigrant myself, I can relate to the struggle of reconciling different cultures within oneself. I had to move and integrate into a different society several times in my life, and each time I had to decide which parts of myself I wanted to leave behind and what was the "core" of my being that I wouldn't compromise on, no matter how strange and "foreign" that made me in my new country. 

And while my culture doesn't have such a radical and repressive stance against women, I still can relate to their struggles. My mother also sacrificed her career to follow my father into a foreign country and dedicated her life to raising a family. She also never bothered to learn the language. She surrounded herself with friends that spoke the same language instead. So you might say that she never fully integrated, even after living there for 20 years.

So a lot of these stories resonated with me, and as a bonus, I got to learn about folklore of other countries, which I am always fascinated with.

PS: I received a free copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Memoir, not horror. A beautiful exploration of self, nonetheless.

Based on the title and description, I had disillusioned myself into believing that Unquiet Spirits was going to be a collection of short Asian horror stories. As a fan of Eastern folklore, I was deeply intrigued. However, what I found was vastly different. Unquiet spirits is a collection of 21 short stories written by Asian women of horror in exploration of their often-disjointed heritage.

A common theme throughout is a sense of cultural loss and disconnect. Often the authors cited this collaboration as a reason to put the difficult work into researching and defining their ancestry and what it means to them in a modern world. In that regard, this is still a beautifully poignant read filled with equal parts research and memoir.

As such I have decided to rate this book 4/5 not because there is anything inherently wrong with the stories or the format, rather that it was not what I had been expecting. If I had gone in with clearer expectations, I am sure I would have been more emotionally receptive overall.

[Thank you to NetGalley and Black Spot Books for a free early copy of this read in exchange for an honest review.]

Most of the stories were beautiful and I thought, It was an interesting take onto the ghosts and the nightmares. Also, I have learned many things. So it was a good read and very enjoyable.

From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of 21 personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

This blew me away. Hand's down one of my favorite collections of anything from the past several years. I couldn't stop reading and finished it in a day. I haven't been swept away in this way since Jeanette Winterson back in the day. A stunning blend of memoir, folklore, and horror which chilled me, made me cry, laugh, and everything else you hope to experience from literature too.

K.P. Kulski, Lee Murray, and Yi Izzy Yu's pieces alone make this collection a must-have. But really nearly every bestiarial piece is a powerhouse (e.g. also Vanessa Fogg; Geneve Flynn; Nadia Bulkin; Benebell Wen; Angela Yuriko Smith). This is almost unheard of in any anthology of anything. I'll be shocked if this doesn't win several major awards. Black Spot Books is doing some amazing things.

Some of the stories are, of course, better than others, but most are in general well-written and haunting. Would love to read some more of certain authors.

This was one of those books that I definitely did not know what I was getting when I originally set to read it. Rather than it being a selection of Ghost Stories, this seems to be a companion piece to an earlier anthology called Black Cranes (which incidentally is from the same publishers) and relates Asian folklore to the lives of Asian Horror Writers in a set of deeply personal essays.
The book is an interesting view of being an Asian woman who has been part of the historic Asian Diaspora throughout the world. Over the perspectives of a number of women from different backgrounds, each short piece has its roots in folklore and mythology and gives a series of self-explorations through the medium of horror.
There are a number of different subjects in this compilation of essays, dealing with trauma, tradition, culture, identity, all mirroring different aspects of being unquiet, of just accepting that things will be the same and that in order to resonate back the feelings of the women who are writing the essays.
The essays themselves have a plethora of differing voices, ranging from the academic, to the conversational. From the formal, to the informal and through these allegorical manifestations of the spirits, monsters and phantasms, the individual writers tell not only their own experiences, but those of their mothers and their grandmothers.
One of the things that I found that resonated with me was the differing interpretations of folklore and how this has an impact on differing cultures. As a person from England, I realise that a number of our folklore tales have now become lost to the mists of time or have been Potterised in order to give a certain boy wizard a back story and have less of impact than they once did (although, I do applaud the woman for using folklore in these books). In addition to his, it is interesting to see how much tales of fox spirits and hungry ghosts still have an effect on different cultures and how they relate to the everyday experience in the twenty first century.
On the whole, I enjoyed this series of essays. As you can guess some hit home more than others, which is something that you would expect when you are reading a collection of essays. A couple seemed out of place, although they are not without their merit, it’s just that they did not seem to fit, and I notice that another reviewer thought the same.
As a postscript, I think for me that the only negative thing (if you can call it that, it was more like a niggle!) that I seemed to get out of the book was that at times I felt that there was some background that I was missing, and I think that this was highlighted more in the first essay in which the author used fragments of her own tales from the earlier anthology Black Cranes, and I felt that it may have been advantageous to read this first, not essential, but advantageous.

This is not my normal type of read, howenever, I am very thankful to have been given the chance to read on advanced copy.

This collection of essays deals with a lot of very sensitive and personal topics, and each author's individual experiences and voice is given a chance to shine through. This is definitely not a light-read, but it is an important one. More stories like this need to be told.

I received a copy of this title from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

I have some mixed feelings about this title if I'm going to be honest. While I love that this title honors the heritage of the Asian community and their beliefs and myths, that aside I think the description is a little misleading. While each essay is exceptional is and of themselves some were very textbook in fashion. I appreciate each authors contribution, but feel that some people may look at this title and mistake it for short yokai or horror stories and may be disappointed when reading the selections inside. Taking away the cover and description for this title the contents are truly amazing. Some of them made me cry they made me so emotional. For that I am giving this title 4 stars

Thank you to Netgalley for an eARC of this book.

It took me a while to gather my thoughts and write a review, and ultimately that's because I was underwhelmed by this collection.

Most of the stories where beautifully written, some where a bit clunky, but the majority of the stories did not stick with me.

Perhaps not right for me but it might be right for you.

Asian women authors and horror? Yes please! Absolutely loved this anthology, and I’ve discovered a lot of new authors to follow. Absolutely devoured this book

Thank you to NetGalley for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“Unquiet Spirit” is a deeply personal and intriguing collection of essays. Across multiple authors you are introduced to a multitude of haunting female ghosts across Asia, ghosts that have found their way into each writer’s life. They symbolize, trauma, tradition, hunger, all of these ghosts reflect the unquiet feelings inside us.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through these essays and receiving multiple perspectives from a diverse collection of Asian diaspora writers. I learned a lot about the mythology and culture of the different countries, that I’d been totally unaware of before. If you enjoy thoughtful essays and want to read some with an element of the supernatural thrown in, this is the collection for you.

This is a wonderfully thought out and well-constructed essay collection. Each story had its own 'ghost' - be it an actual creature from horror and folk tales or a manifestation of little pieces of womanhood and the search of belonging in this world. I believe each reader will find essays that resonate with them the most, that spell out their deepest thoughts, and some stories may be less intruiging but no less interesting and evocative. The collection is masterfully edited to show off the writers' unique strenghts and style, and to join the essays into a cohesive compilation of self-exploration through horror.
My absolute favourite essays:
"The Substitute""
"Fox Daughter"
"100 Livers"
"Plant a Cherry Tree Over My Grave"
"Ghost Month in Taiwan"

Though I typically don’t read non-fiction anthologies, Unquiet Spirits’ blurb caught my attention as I am very interested in how myths have the power to shape beliefs and social roles, and I’m so glad that I gave this book a shot.
With each author writing about their own lives, cultures and identities, this collection of essays was a very enriching and emotional read. I loved learning about folklore through these brilliantly written essays, and I recommend it all readers who are interested in myths and lore.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an eARC in exchange for an honest review

This collection of essays written by Asian horror authors comprises a variety of voices from the academic to the conversational, from a variety of ancestral lands, and from new homelands across the Asian diaspora. Through ghost stories, allegories, and traditional folk tales, these women are able to parse their experiences and those of their parents and grandparents as they’ve left their homes behind. Filled with ruminations on longing, belonging, and feeling in between, Unquiet Spirits brings all of these voices together to give a picture of the stories that bind us all to our history and shape our understanding of ourselves.

As with any collection, there are essays that were more accessible to me, and more strongly written. I will say that the number of authors and the wildly varying styles did sometimes make the whole feel disjointed, but I found very few essays that really didn’t resonate. In addition to reading about some truly fascinating and terrifying (and mostly female) otherworldly creatures, I realized that the tales of the unquiet woman are cautionary in nature, but also reveal how frightened the status quo is of women who find their voice. This is a theme that I see in folktales from other cultures as well, and it was interesting to see how some authors identified with and claimed the hungry spirits as their own.

Recommended for students of folklore, fans of fairy tales, and anyone with interest in the stories of the women of the Asian diaspora.

Thank you to Netgalley and Black Spot Books for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

I fell in love with the cover and loved the essays that made me learn a lot about lore and myths.
All these essays are well written, intriguing, and well researched.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Thank you to Black Spot Books Non-Fiction for providing me with an e-ARC of Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror!

I love non-fiction that has anything to do with horror & Unquiet Spirits was absolutely no exception. I learned so much about different lore in several different Asian cultures & every essay tied these stories with the author's personal lives & gosh, I loved it. Every single author in the TOC put their heart in every word they wrote; it was so raw and honest. 10/10 recommend.

3.5 stars, rounding up
Twenty-one essays blending themes of family, loss, and identity with spirits/ghosts of Asian folklore.  While this wasn't what I was expecting, I did enjoy these very personal writings, as well as the backstories of the Asian spirits  and their roles in various cultures.