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A review by gabberjaws
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
dark
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
The more I think about this, the madder I get.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth follows Cat who, along with a small group of "friends" travels to an old abandoned, supposedly haunted mansion in Japan. Everyone in the group considers themselves to be ghost-chasers - you know, the kinds of people who purposefully visit haunted sites in hopes of seeing something supernatural. Also the bride has wanted to get married in a haunted house since she was 10. As one does.
As you can imagine, shit hits the fan pretty fast. (I mean, what did you expect, getting married in a haunted mansion, ya know?) But as delicious as this set up may seem, this book doesn't really do anything with it.
One of this book's biggest letdowns was Khaw's purple prose-y writing. Do not get me wrong, I can appreciate purple prose when used right - and at the very beginning of the novel, it did seem like it WOULD be used right. In the correct moments, Khaw's flowery narration was beautiful and helped dress the setting really well. But this is a horror novella. You can't be describing someone's death and comparing it to constellations. Or maybe you can, but you should really be reigning yourself in, because if every other sentence in your novella is as ornate and melodramatic then you are ruining your tension and urgency. Khaw did not reign themselves in.
It's a shame. This book went down really easy - I never at any point felt like I was going to DNF, or like it was a chore to read. But it was so disappointing . There were... threads. Little bits of info that could have been used to craft a really meaty, tense, thoughtful horror short about messy people making messy decisions and having to suffer the consequences of it. But ultimately the paranormal aspect went absolutely nowhere, there was a character just annoyingly quipping through most of the climax and ADDING to the lack of urgency/suspense, and we were left with a group of wholly unlikeable, flat, cliched characters who didn't care about each other, who the heroine didn't seem to care about in a way that felt tangible to us, and who made some truly idiotic decisions for no fucking reason we could determine.
The story I was imagining in my head when I read the "Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu line was 10000% better than the one I was given. Sad.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth follows Cat who, along with a small group of "friends" travels to an old abandoned, supposedly haunted mansion in Japan. Everyone in the group considers themselves to be ghost-chasers - you know, the kinds of people who purposefully visit haunted sites in hopes of seeing something supernatural. Also the bride has wanted to get married in a haunted house since she was 10. As one does.
As you can imagine, shit hits the fan pretty fast. (I mean, what did you expect, getting married in a haunted mansion, ya know?) But as delicious as this set up may seem, this book doesn't really do anything with it.
One of this book's biggest letdowns was Khaw's purple prose-y writing. Do not get me wrong, I can appreciate purple prose when used right - and at the very beginning of the novel, it did seem like it WOULD be used right. In the correct moments, Khaw's flowery narration was beautiful and helped dress the setting really well. But this is a horror novella. You can't be describing someone's death and comparing it to constellations. Or maybe you can, but you should really be reigning yourself in, because if every other sentence in your novella is as ornate and melodramatic then you are ruining your tension and urgency. Khaw did not reign themselves in.
It's a shame. This book went down really easy - I never at any point felt like I was going to DNF, or like it was a chore to read. But it was so disappointing . There were... threads. Little bits of info that could have been used to craft a really meaty, tense, thoughtful horror short about messy people making messy decisions and having to suffer the consequences of it. But ultimately the paranormal aspect went absolutely nowhere, there was a character just annoyingly quipping through most of the climax and ADDING to the lack of urgency/suspense, and we were left with a group of wholly unlikeable, flat, cliched characters who didn't care about each other, who the heroine didn't seem to care about in a way that felt tangible to us, and who made some truly idiotic decisions for no fucking reason we could determine.
The story I was imagining in my head when I read the "Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu line was 10000% better than the one I was given. Sad.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Death, and Gore