From the book, “[n]obody [in China] wants to publish horror.” I could speculate on why that might be, but because I’m hoping to somehow slide into heaven I will not. I did learn some things here, for example, “the most common term for Horror as a whole is kongbu wenxhe, the same kongbu that is used for Terrorism.” Therefore, to say that horror has a bit of an identity problem in China is understating by a hundredfold.

“The Chinese view of Horror has always struck [the editor] as being unique where nearly every horror myth [she] has come across in the West is a cautionary tale, China has a long tradition of journal and documentational style writing, referred to as the “zhiguai” or tales of the strange, that mixes history with legends and hearsay. Much of that style is seen here in the book.

Given that there’s not much history nor much output of horror in China it’s not surprising that the stories included here are the most innovative or riveting, but as a huge fan of the genre, I love seeing what is being done in other countries and want to support those writers who are working in the genre. Plus, some of the stories are quite interesting from a historical perspective and I will be curious to see how the genre develops as time goes by. Writers in China definitely have a unique perspective on the world today.

The editor discussed that she had a digging time getting contributors for the volume, especially women, and God bless her for the lengths she went to to find them. There’s a fair amount of misogyny in some of the stories…equality between the sexes has far to go in China.

I was unsurprised that I had not heard of any of the authors included in the anthology. Cai Jun is, apparently, probably the best known writer of horror in China and he has a story here. My favorite story was “Forbidden Rooms” by Zhou Haohui, but several were good. I would encourage serious horror lovers to take a look at this, just to support the work being done, and so that we see more books like this.

I loved this book. Foreign horror is amazing and eye opening. It is interesting to see what is considered horror from various authors perspectives!