Anyone who has searched for a community of their own will immediately be enthralled by the introduction of Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. Fu begins the novel with a recap of the heroine’s fantasy of buying her first home: to find a village in the cookie-cutter housing of a barely-completed development. Sadly, it’s not safety Eleanor finds in the model home that she purchases but a massive amount of debt — and ghosts.
Eleanor Fan, a therapist, is content letting her mother run most aspects of her life. This includes a joint bank account as well as client outreach to those who are behind on paying their bills. After her mother dies, Eleanor feels lost as the only acting adult. She focuses on the list of edicts left behind by her mother until only one last wish needs fulfilling: she must use her inheritance to buy a home. Limited options in her price range and a vicious competition for housing leaves her with only one choice: a model home in the soon-to-be-restarted development of Bering Rock.
Eleanor is unsure if it’s a pleasant or unpleasant surprise when her first offer on the model home in Bering Rock is accepted. Budget-friendly and with more space than she can ask for, she begins moving in. Small things start to go wrong with the house, including leaking windows, a broken lock and the ghost of her mother appearing to follow her around. Slowly, we see the truth behind the mother-daughter relationship, and it is not quite what it seemed before.
As Eleanor begins to piece together the alarming puzzle of the abandoned development, her complacency is exchanged for fear. Left behind by a bankrupted millionaire, the town has nothing but ghost stories and hard feelings for the development. When attempting to call for a locksmith, Eleanor finds few people willing to make the ride up the mountain road at all. Those who are willing are as unsavory as the place itself. There is no village to be found in Bering Rock.
Reality shifts from past to present and back again, and it becomes harder for Eleanor to separate dreams from reality. With the lines blurring, Eleanor also finds it hard to separate herself from her clients, beginning to feel the weight of their situations added to her own. Eleanor is surrounded by the heavy-hearted ghosts of everyone she has encountered. In this respect, I thoroughly enjoyed the lack of wall between the dead and the living. In most ghost stories, flashbacks are italicized or characters are continuously described as floating or see-through. Fu, however, intertwines the past and present, the living and the nonliving, in a casualness that adds to the disembodied reality. Readers are guessing at what is real and what is not just as much as Eleanor. The dead speak without quotation marks in italicized text, but otherwise the distinction is unmarked.
As the house continues to flood and fall into pieces around her, Eleanor feels more underwater than the average new homeowner. Re-connecting with an ex-boyfriend brings out the inevitable source of grief she had been trying to avoid: the truth behind her mother’s death. Following the exposure of another one of her mother’s deathbed decrees, Eleanor begins looking into the mysterious origins of her new house. After breaking into the home of the first land developer, can Eleanor come to terms with her own grief and find an end in her new nightmare? Or will more disaster follow grief?
Technology acts as a mode of denial in the cycle of grieving. Eleanor is consistent in her want for someone else — or something else — to run her life for her. After the 2020 pandemic, Eleanor starts conducting virtual therapy sessions using an application that not only connects her to clients but also runs the statistics and financial elements of a therapeutic practice. The digital service Eleanor uses shows how human connections are being replaced by technology in our daily lives. When Eleanor meets with a client on the brink of breakthrough, she ends the session because the program messages her that their time is up. This goes against her instinct to continue with the client at this pivotal moment as her training would dictate. She ignores her instinct and follows the application’s demands instead. Fu gives us a look at genuine symptoms from the pandemic: how work models changed, how emotionally charged her clients are afterward, and the general lack of human connection. It is no surprise that Eleanor seeks companionship in ghosts while technology controls most of her life. As the weight of her clients’ issues grows heavier, Fu also begs the question: if therapists are there to help clients, who is there to help a therapist?
Blurbs on the back cover talk about how the novel is an easy one to devour in one sitting, and I cannot disagree. The pace of the novel is consistent, and the action was compelling enough to keep my mind from wandering. A psychological look at grief with elements of an overbearing technological age following the 2020 pandemic, Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts illuminates a part of horror that is dear to my heart: it is in shock and awe moments that we see the truth of humanity. The good, the bad and the terrifying.
