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.

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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.

CLUTCH, verb or noun...you decide

CLUTCH
EMILY NEMENS
Zando / Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

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My Review: I wanted to love this story.

I did not love this story. I *made* myself finish it. I was pissed off at these privileged women taking their genuine, and genuinely intractable, problems so utterly seriously. There was no perspective checking; no one said to Gregg, for example, "you can fix this personal issue if you're willing to reframe your worries about it," no one said "Reba, there are other ways to get this thing you want quit fixating on it as a failure."

When you've known each other for decades, you ought to be able to say stuff like that. You ought to be the perspective-checkers in each others' lives, as a privilege of the groups' friendship longevity. It ought to be relatively easy to see the solution your bud's ignoring or unaware she should give more thought to. But all five of these women are self-absorbed so don't make that kind of effort.

I finished all eleventy bajillion pages because I really liked Author Nemes' use of stream-of-consciousness narration, as it gave me the immediacy that saved the story from permanent exile. I might not've liked the women but I sure knew them. I was not at all convinced these women would make the terrible choices they did in their men. Not one of the men was worth the powder it would take to blow him up. That's very unlikely; these are high-powered women, educated, smart; they would not *all* have fallen for the idiotic, nasty men portrayed here.

I've read many versions of this gang o' pals narrative before. I was not sold on the merits of this iteration of that evergreen story. I really wanted to be.

THE SALVAGE, sapphic Gothic Scottish fun

THE SALVAGE
ANBARA SALAM
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A twisting, gothic literary thriller sure to delight fans of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, The Wonder by Emma Donaghue, and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship's artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island—and their secrets—in an icy wilderness.

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My Review: Sapphic gothic ghost story set in the icy winter waters of the North Sea off Scotland? Meat and drink! Get in my eyeholes!

Marta, a woman in the dangerous business of commercial salvage diving in 1962, is a rarity. It's her husband who runs things, and maybe it's just me but seems to me he's not averse to taking on jobs that put Marta in very significant danger. As the story unfolds, there are secrets in this marriage that, well, that cast doubts....

She's evidently, however, still down with this. Not only does her narrative voice convey very significant pleasure in the underwater world, she's at her sharpest while observing the wreck off Cairnroch. The eerie shadow? That's not an object, that's a being and no being not suited up like her belongs down there. Anyone would get the hell away as fast as possible!

Returning to the surface, badly shaken but with her inventory of the salvage to be collected, there occur things to prevent her from going down to begin salvage right away. On the return trip, she discovers there are very significant items missing...she inventoried them, now they're not there. (Listing them would be spoilery, so no on that.) What's happened? It's not like deep salvage diving is something just anyone can do, nor is it obvious how the heck the stuff was removed, or where it could've gone.

It makes the cold reception of the (quite Calvinist) Cairnroch people more pronounced...the treasure belonged to a very revered local hero, whose family has commissioned the recovery of material to fill a museum on the island. The extreme cold of that winter, the greatly heated up Cold War (this was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and the weird behavior of the islanders towards her make Marta...uneasy...plus, after the artifacts she was to salvage got disappeared, things got no better. Worse, in fact as now she can't shake the sense of being followed...since the Presence on the wreck gave her a scare.

With all the troubles piling up, Marta needs backup. Her husband isn't there, wouldn't be likely to help if he was...he's still angry over some stuff...though he is still her boss. Anyway a local will be more help because things are weird in this place she's isolated inside by weather, world events, and the job she still needs to pull off in order to get paid.

Enter Elsie. She's so local she works at Cairnroch's only hotel. She and Marta are...eyeing each other up...so maybe she will act as Marta's go-between to see what the hell's happening here. And on this super religious rock, Elsie's probably never had a better opportunity for a hook-up. And I do not think anyone on the island's at all fooled by their sneakin' ways. It's another layer of Other in a world obsessed, in that terrible, cruel Calvinist way, with Us-v-Them. I was pretty unconvinced by the way the "special friendship" developed considering Marta's dramatically obvious Otherness and Elsie's being One of Us to the islanders.

The resolution to the different situations arrives as one would hope it would, arising from the events Author Salam's created; but honestly it was waaay later than it would ideally have been. Marta and Elsie aren't any closer at the end than is decorous. It felt to me that, for three-quarters of the book, I was hoping Marta's husband would show up and stir the pot, or something equally dramatic.

This is not a dramatic book. It's all vibes. Really, really good vibes...I put my cardigan on half a dozen times despite it being seventy degrees in here...but short on the stuff of drama. Fights? Not even verbal ones. Hauntings? Self-inflicted ones galore. All very interesting to me. Not terribly exciting.

As someone who appreciates a narrator who isn't seeing what's really happening but instead what her shadows let her see, I was fine with this. Marta, Syrian/Scot like the author is, is a woman out of every place she's ever been put. Check. Marta's really sure she Knows the Score, despite not seeing the hoop half the time. Check. Marta's never let her defenses down, not for anyone; too risky. Check. The list goes on.

Reading diary entries is a very gothic way to build suspense. I myownself don't think it works in favor of low-conflict, high vibes stories so that seems like a miss to me. It would be a five-star read as an only-vibes novella; it only gets to four stars as a heavy-vibes gothic eerie haunted-house novel, with too little (and too incredibly uncritically unexamined) sapphic stuff to really get past the gate into the churchyard.

So I can't recommend it unreservedly but can definitely say there's a pleasurable red here for a vibes reader seeking wintertime chills; anyone who likes underwater scenes is going to purr happily, as they're some of the most effective writing in the story; and those in love with a ghost story for Yule.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ, Native American author Morgan Talty bursts onto the literary radar bigtime

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ: Stories
MORGAN TALTY
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, The New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree

A Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Chautauqua Prize 2023, and Barnes & Noble Discover Book Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Esquire, Oprah Daily, and more

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.

In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.

A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

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My Review: When a new voice speaks in a jaded crowd, it feels like being next to a rocket launch does. The sound is so loud, so intense, its pressure unbalances your legs and knocks you back on your heels.

Morgan Talty, laddies and gentlewomen. From the first story, where we're confronted with cultural touchstones not in upper-class white peoples' frames of reference, we're in assured hands...the limning of the setting, the colors of the relationship dynamics, the milieu, all in three paragraphs...and challenged to accept the entire package as it is.

"Fucking bullshit, fucking goddamn winter, what the fuck."
I laughed.
"It ain't funny, Dee."
"Look," I said. "Do you want me to cut my braid too?"

I shall, comme d'habitude, use the Bryce Method to assess the stories one-by-one.


Burn is the story I quoted above. A short, sharp shock, a shot across the bow of your luxury literary yacht, a foghorn on a sunny cruise. Disorienting by design, this is your chance to return to familiar shores.

I didn't. 5 impressed stars

In a Jar follows David studying his fractured family as it re-forms in unfamiliar ways. His much older sister, first an absence, then a hard sharp corner; his Mumma, inscrutable to kid-eyed David, touchy and strange; Frick, a man new to David and in a place his abandoned father once didn't want.

All the surprise in this concatenated chain of beings comes from knockings in walls, from jars of ill will, from refrigerated poisons ingested through other mouths. 5 more stars

Get Me Some Medicine follows low-life Fellis...the one talking to Dee in the quote all the way above...as he and Dee scrape the bottom of the barrel, drain the butt-end-filled last can of beer, and do themselves no good whatever doing it.

You can't save people. Nor should you, after a while, try. I don't think these boys, these pushing-thirty boys, can be saved. And neither do they. Dee is, at the very least, possessed of glimmers of self-awareness; Fellis, none. 4*

Food for the Common Cold shakes the ugly bits you never tell your partner loose. David, eleven now, can't quite grasp why Frick is so angry; Mumma can't tell him, he's too young; his Dad's far away and shut out like always; so it festers and seethes, finally David lances the boil out of fear for his mother, and out it all oozes for everyone to see, smell, and finally clean up.

Leaving David sick with, what, a cold? A cloggy, soggy cold? Maybe, maybe more. 4.5*

In a Field of Stray Caterpillars gets useless shitty Fellis even deeper into the badness, as he's now got Dee driving him home from his ECT treatments then spending the night there...and Dee's got a white woman on the line, knowing there's never going to be a good ending to that story, still running from what he knows he needs to do by using Fellis.

And this night, the one we're joining the boys to live through, is in the midst of a major mating season overload. The reek of the rotting animals mirrors Fellis and Dee's vacuity by filling the world with a passing stink that won't even result in better-nourished weeds. Fellis is so far gone the nurses are taking about putting a port in him so they don't have to hunt for a vein when they need to fry him with ECT.

How perfect. 5*

The Blessing Tobacco is a family...David's family, now with his much-older sister home...coming to terms with the end of an elder's life, when her body will not die at the same rate as her mind. It's just terrible and painful and all folded in with each others' craziness, fear, and anger.

Outliving your mind is a terrible curse. Outliving your family? Oh. It's scalding water on an icy windshield. 5*

Safe Harbor isn't...when is it ever? How do you ever know when you're going to have that moment of final fear? The one that changes your orientation in the world, the one where you are not the same person between seconds? David becoming Dee doesn't happen in front of us. But happen it does and we don't know him one speck better than before. 5*

Smokes Last brings me face-to-face with one of my most beloathèd addictions: cigarettes. I despise smokers. They reek, they're so unbelievably selfish, taking up all the air in a room and then flinging the leftover chunk of spit-soaked stinking garbage wherever and however it suits them, slowly drowning in the phlegm they hack onto streets and sidewalks for other people to deal with.

And here's fourteen-year-old David shovin' one into his mouth, "just suck a cock! it tastes better and at least somebody's happy!" I want to (maybe did) shout at him. He and his buds out bein' hooligans, beatin' each other up, chuckin' rocks...kids are so much the same everywhere.

Growing up. Not getting any guidance. No wonder what happens happened. 4*

Half-Life is the sharp part of the descent. It's harrowing and appalling and brutally bitterly honest. 4.5*

Earth, Speak is rock bottom. Harrowing. 5*

Night of the Living Rez would've been more palatable if it'd been zombies, or pugwagees; instead it was all over the fucking TV because of course it was and, if it'd been a white woman, it would've been self defense. 5 appalled stars

The Name Means Thunder burns in my head. The sheer horror of what happens when you can't undo a deed. The never-ending awfulness of life's worst moments defining you, charting your course. Too many undone deeds that lead to a done one. The worst of it is: you can't not see it in every moment of every awful undone deed. 5*

Morgan Talty's debut. Can you even imagine having this in you and no way for it to come out that won't change...everything.

SOUR CHERRY, feminist retelling of the folktale Bluebeard...only with empathy

SOUR CHERRY
NATALIA THEODORIDOU
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

2025 Nebula Award nominee for Best Novel. Winners will be announced June 3-7, 2026.

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for FIRST NOVEL!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.

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My Review: Retelling "Bluebeard," one of the most unsettling folk tales I've ever encountered, was a shoo-in to get my admiring attention for this novelist's debut effort. At about the 45% mark, the scene under the cherry tree, I found the time jumping wearing me down...no particular effect was, in my observation, intended for these shifts. They do not seem coupled to changes in emotional register, or attached to revelations of characters' understandings of themselves or each other. Instead they felt to me like ways to avoid exploring an important shift in something because after the time shift the event shifted from is dealt with in short and sharp explanation..."after that Tristan looked at his hand a lot"...without much depth. As this story explores the fear and the disappointment that must inevitably accompany truly loving another person, that matters. The ending was, as a result of this ongoing issue, a bit anticlimactic.

The plus side is that this is a retelling of a quite brutal tale that tries hard to be in the main character's corner. Something that gives kids like me nightmares is brought into the realm of reason. It's very empathetic, it's very willing to engage the readers' empathy. This makes the awfulness all the more poignant and impactful, and is the source of all my positive feelings for the book. It grapples with the deep, oceanic sadness of loving someone who is haunted by an awful past, whose emotional tides do not stop at the shores between himself and the world. It brings a lovingkindness to the seemingly cursed eternal outsider, yet doesn't play the victim card for the monster or the lover.

Craft quibbles aside, I found this story quite engrossing or I'd've simply Pearl-Ruled it. I haven't raised the thematic elements of horror to content-warning status because, frankly, if you need CWs on ancient folktales you won't consider the read for more than a split second anyway.

A debut novel that portends a career of fascinating work. I already want to read Author Theodoridou's next book.