Donald Maass Literary Agency

NPR: Nothing But Blackened Teeth is visually stunning. Of course, a novella is just words but Khaw’s command of language in service of an image — their brilliance when it comes to wedding image with emotion — is sheer perfection here, with gorgeous turns of phrase that deepen our understanding of the characters and their responses to one another. Atmosphere seeps from every page, and you really feel like you too are exploring this house, like this house is closing around you, too. You feel like you just might be able to notice what’s wrong, or where the wrongness is springing from, before anybody else.

I like the characters. They form a unit more because of shared history than because they would be friends in the present, which serves this particular type of story very well. Readers will get frustrated with one person’s choices and say “Why are you being so stupid?” or “Don’t do that!” — but so will another character. One of Khaw’s strengths is their ability to show fully realized, nuanced social dynamics.

This is a creepy, meticulously-crafted tragedy and frankly, one of the most beautifully written haunted stories I’ve ever read. As in the best ghost stories, the house is full of ghosts, but it’s the people who are the houses. We’re haunted by our histories, by the ugly things we want to keep buried, by the things we just can’t let go. Nothing But Blackened Teeth will linger with you.

Tor.com: Nothing but Blackened Teeth fills the mouth like a big bite of tendon—meat that requires chewing with all the muscle in your jaw, mixing savor with a visceral density. As a novella, of course, “one big bite” is especially apt. At the exact moment the brutality of the climax started to provoke the first wash of nausea for me, the grisly tension unspools and the remainder can be swallowed whole.

Khaw has a truly deft hand at crafting gruesome poetics within their prose fiction. Whether it’s the sensation of sipping from a water bottle to find it clogged with algae and old hair, or watching a friend use his fingernails to dig loose his own tooth roots and all, or devouring a sumptuously marrow-fatty wedding/funeral meal… the novella’s world is a felt world, one the characters engage through their bodies. It’s as nasty as it is delicious, as much rotten as sweet.

Which brings me to the other aspect of Nothing but Blackened Teeth that made me wriggle with delight: the merging and twisting of several generic forms into one dense, scary package. Khaw effortless interweaves source materials from the gothic to youkai tales, spooky traditions such as hyakumonogatari kaidankai to literary tropes about “loathsomely rich twenty-somethings and their murderous interpersonal drama.” And, more to the point, they explain none of those wellsprings to the audience. You’re either going to come along, or you aren’t. I appreciate being required to engage with a text on multiple levels—and Khaw’s novella allows the reader to dig as deep or coast as light as they like.

Critiques of power and violence are also woven into the manor’s original ghost story—an entombed young bride and the hundreds of girls murdered to be with her over the decades creating a ghost made from loss and desire, betrayal and loneliness. Ultimately, there is an intense emotional realism underlying the blood-soaked, claustrophobic horror of a night spent in the haunted manor. From the twistiness of Cat’s limping psychological recovery, to her miserable friends and their miserable attachments to one another, Khaw constructs a memorable and cautionary spooky story of their own.

Turn down the lights and give it a read, some dark night.

BookPage: Cassandra Khaw’s horror novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth brings readers to Japan, where a wedding of questionable taste is about to unfold. Nadia, who is engaged to Faiz, has decided she wants to be married in a haunted house. The couple’s mega-rich friend Phillip secures a venue for them: a Heian-era mansion in a forest, built on the bones of a bride-to-be and other girls killed to appease her loneliness.

Khaw builds horror slowly and evenly. Rather than sporadically appearing to frighten and terrorize the young squad of not-quite-friends, the spirits of the house appear with steadily increasing frequency until they are simply present in every scene. By the novella’s climax, the tension has increased to such an unbearable degree that the final burst of violence is more expected than surprising.

Readers looking for bite-size horror on a stormy night will appreciate Khaw’s twisted tale of foolish young adults, all of whom are poorly prepared for the effects their decisions will have on their psyches (and lives).