THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel, grief and grieving and loss drown a woman

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel
KIM FU
Zando/Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When something is too good to be true, it is. Nothing is more guaranteed to blind you to that reality than desperation. Eleanor's mother, Lele, has controlled Eleanor's life to the point of a toxic...but comfortable...dependence on Lele for the mechanics of living. Tedious adulting offloaded onto a partner is seldom a good idea, and when the partner is a parent it is catastrophic. Parents die. it's part of the bargain. Eleanor finds Lele's death more than merely unpleasant, more than simply painful: it's her utter undoing. Lele cooked, laundered, managed Eleanor's world. Her inevitable death, far too early it's true, unmoors Eleanor in every way.

Parents expect their children will grieve on their death but continue to live and to manage themselves as one has taught them to do. Lele has not taught Eleanor anything of note, for complicated reasons no doubt but the effect is now all Eleanor has is last instructions: Buy a house.

Ever bought a house? It is complicated, it is intimidating, it is unnervingly legal and permanent and deepy scary. Eleanor is ludicrously ill-suited to the task on every level. It is no wonder she, deeply immersed in her business life of being a therapist, makes practical mistakes with emotional consequences. She can afford this really cool-sounding house in a stunning natural setting? How? That should be so far out of her reach...what's the catch, where's the trigger, what?? But you need to be savvy to the ways of the world to see that from the off, Author Fu writes this description of the realtor who sells her this place: "His thick hair was slicked back, coiffed high off his forehead. He smiled toothily as she approached. He held his hand out for a shake, and a large watch slid out of his jacket sleeve, the band and bezel the same chrome brightness as his car."

Run, Eleanor, run! But of course she doesn't. So she ends up with the whitest elephant of all white elephants. And the unraveling begins.

It's here where I leave Eleanor and her plight to you to discover. I took the trip to tell you if it was one worth taking, and why. It's a modern take on horror, this dread and unmooredness, this sense of waters so much deeper than you thought fro looking at them, this...unease. Eleanor stands in for us on the cusp of a revolution no one wants, on every front. No matter how much AI slop "They" feed us, people don't care about it; no matter how much doubt "They" fling over reality, summers are hotter and winters weirder and more violent; so there's a constant pressure to mistrust your own sense of Reality and leave everything to "Them" to manage.

It's not going well. For us, for Eleanor, for the planet.

The way the story unfolds is intended to build that...wrongness, unease, unhappiness...into the experience the reader and Eleanor exist inside, to make the boil expand so it will finally pop, them be cleaned out. But by whom? At what cost in pain and unpleasant side effects? Can we, in fact, clean up our own mess?

Not if we, like Eleanor, have no real connection to the way "They" are running reality on our behalf.

It's short enough as a read to be a weekend's focused read. It's intense enough as a narrative to support that kind of sustained attention. It's a deeply satisfying immersion into the slow awakening of a grieving soul to the cost of extending childhood far, far too long. It's hard to be alive in a world beset by challenges too big to make a positive difference in by one's self.

Welcome to adulthood. Go out and do the work, no matter how scary or hard, because the alternative is drowning.