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2.72 AVERAGE
2.72 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Blood, Vomit, Grief, Murder, Toxic friendship, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Excrement, Fire/Fire injury
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
This was a quick bite of horror, great for ringing in the spooky autumn season but overall prioritizing style over substance. Nothing but Blackened Teeth rings in at just above a hundred pages, squeezing a traditional horror buildup and climax into a much shorter page count than I’m used to. While I really did like the overall setup of the novella and the characters, it would’ve benefitted from spending far less valuable words on flowery descriptors and language and more on the actual scares and development of the story.
Five friends gather at an ancient haunted Japanese mansion for, of all things, a wedding. Cat is a tentative wedding guest to Nadia and Faiz’s private ceremony; she’s an old friend, but not necessarily a welcome one after a tumultuous history. Accompanying them is golden-boy Phillip and troublemaker Lin, each with their own histories with the group, and the five set out to explore the grounds, make merry before the ceremony, and catch up on old times. But the very thing that attracted the couple to the mansion, its history of a heartbroken woman buried alive beneath the floorboards, is watching them, and she’s not one to be denied a wedding.
What really propelled me further into this novella was our main character, Cat, and her history among the group. Her background adds just as much to the horror scene as the supernatural themes do, both due to her own misery and the way those around her react to it. Her diagnosis doesn’t appear in the text (if I’m not mistaken), but she’s clearly highly depressed with a slew of other unspecified problems, resulting in attempted suicide before the novella even begins. She’s tentatively better when the text starts, but her history isn’t erased. Horror so often takes advantage of its mentally ill characters, but I feel like this story did right by her: it didn’t diminish what she had gone through, her mental state makes her more aware and sympathetic to the horror atmosphere rising in the background, and she’s placed in a web of friends who care about her but don’t seem to know what to do with her (unfortunate, but realistic). Cat’s labyrinthine thought processes made for some great moments of instability and unreality.
But if Cat and her friends are the core of the narrative, then the actual horror itself is kept wrapt up and away from us, covered in purple prose and over-the-top language. As much as I liked Cat, I want some horror from my horror novella. There was some creepy imagery, but it felt bogged down by endless descriptors. Even the literal title, nothing but blackened teeth, was a phrase repeated so many times it ceased being a motif and ventured into the territory of browbeating. I didn’t have an issue with any of the individual descriptions, most of them would’ve even been quite good on their own, but there’s only so many circulatory words and phrases I can read before growing bored.
Khaw obviously has a great mind for character development/interactions and horror setups. They even have a great mind for descriptions! This novella felt just unbalanced as a whole, with lots of lyrical writing in places that just distracted from the topic at hand. It’s hard to tell if this is a result of the novella format, wherein I might not have minded all the purple prose if it had more plot to pad it, but I think it might be, and I’m still looking forward to reading Khaw’s work in the future.
Five friends gather at an ancient haunted Japanese mansion for, of all things, a wedding. Cat is a tentative wedding guest to Nadia and Faiz’s private ceremony; she’s an old friend, but not necessarily a welcome one after a tumultuous history. Accompanying them is golden-boy Phillip and troublemaker Lin, each with their own histories with the group, and the five set out to explore the grounds, make merry before the ceremony, and catch up on old times. But the very thing that attracted the couple to the mansion, its history of a heartbroken woman buried alive beneath the floorboards, is watching them, and she’s not one to be denied a wedding.
What really propelled me further into this novella was our main character, Cat, and her history among the group. Her background adds just as much to the horror scene as the supernatural themes do, both due to her own misery and the way those around her react to it. Her diagnosis doesn’t appear in the text (if I’m not mistaken), but she’s clearly highly depressed with a slew of other unspecified problems, resulting in attempted suicide before the novella even begins. She’s tentatively better when the text starts, but her history isn’t erased. Horror so often takes advantage of its mentally ill characters, but I feel like this story did right by her: it didn’t diminish what she had gone through, her mental state makes her more aware and sympathetic to the horror atmosphere rising in the background, and she’s placed in a web of friends who care about her but don’t seem to know what to do with her (unfortunate, but realistic). Cat’s labyrinthine thought processes made for some great moments of instability and unreality.
But if Cat and her friends are the core of the narrative, then the actual horror itself is kept wrapt up and away from us, covered in purple prose and over-the-top language. As much as I liked Cat, I want some horror from my horror novella. There was some creepy imagery, but it felt bogged down by endless descriptors. Even the literal title, nothing but blackened teeth, was a phrase repeated so many times it ceased being a motif and ventured into the territory of browbeating. I didn’t have an issue with any of the individual descriptions, most of them would’ve even been quite good on their own, but there’s only so many circulatory words and phrases I can read before growing bored.
Khaw obviously has a great mind for character development/interactions and horror setups. They even have a great mind for descriptions! This novella felt just unbalanced as a whole, with lots of lyrical writing in places that just distracted from the topic at hand. It’s hard to tell if this is a result of the novella format, wherein I might not have minded all the purple prose if it had more plot to pad it, but I think it might be, and I’m still looking forward to reading Khaw’s work in the future.
The only best character of the book was the ghost herself.
Basically, while reading this novella, I had two different experiences. 1) While reading the prose surrounding all the dialogue, I was so impressed by the BEAUTIFUL writing; gorgeous imagery and figurative wordplay made the surrounding writing feel like a blurry, mysterious water painting. Absolutely beautiful! 2) The characters are so poorly rendered, that when I read their dialogue, I just cringed each time. They are stupidly cliche, useless to the plot, and they ruined the story for me. That gorgeous water painting created by the prose? Yeah, it's like the author came in with sharpies and drew stick figures over it.
Seriously, the HUGE difference between the prose versus the characters and their dialogue made the experience of reading this novella jarring; at times, it felt as though two authors were writing this: the first writing poetry of a haunting, the second stitching in these awful characters randomly throughout the first's writings. You take the characters out of this story and you'd have a much better story.
Seriously, the HUGE difference between the prose versus the characters and their dialogue made the experience of reading this novella jarring; at times, it felt as though two authors were writing this: the first writing poetry of a haunting, the second stitching in these awful characters randomly throughout the first's writings. You take the characters out of this story and you'd have a much better story.
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Very disappointed in this book. I hated the characters. They’re “friends” but immediately so hateful to each other that I really was hoping they’d start dying sooner. Seventy pages of interpersonal bull before the haunting starts. At least the cover and the title are good.