Nothing But Blackened Teeth

by Cassandra Khaw

Genres: Horror
Pages: 128
Rating:

Synopsis:

Cat joins her old friends, who are in search of the perfect wedding venue, to spend the night in a Heian-era manor in Japan. Trapped in webs of love, responsibility and yesterdays, they walk into a haunted house with their hearts full of ghosts.

This mansion is long abandoned, but it is hungry for new guests, and welcomes them all – welcomes the demons inside them – because it is built on foundations of sacrifice and bone.

Their night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare as the house draws them into its embrace. 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.

I’ve found that Cassandra Khaw’s work is a bit hit and miss for me, and Nothing But Blackened Teeth was more of a miss. The setup is really creepy, and there are some beautiful and fascinating descriptions and scene-setting, but the relationships between the characters were a tangled mess. Intentionally so, interpersonally, but I mean that it was difficult to parse out who hated whom and why, and whether any of these people liked each other even a little bit.

The richness of the writing also tipped over into purple prose, or… at least being more distracting than functional, which is a problem I’ve had with Khaw’s work before. Sometimes it’s hard to even tell what’s going on… which again, does go hand-in-hand with the main character’s mental state, but still, it was a rough read because of it.

It’s all a bit messy and didn’t make for the most pleasant read, sadly. Just didn’t gel for me.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)