Earlier this year, we read Cassandra Khaw’s horror fairy tale These Deathless Bones as part of our short story club Lite Reads (you can find the selection post here and the review post here). I was a big fan of this creepy fairytale story and decided that it couldn’t be the only thing I read from the author. When I got the chance to obtain a review copy of Khaw’s upcoming novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I jumped at it. The phenomenally chilling cover, featuring an Ohaguro-Bettari, was definitely an incentive as well, something that probably would have drawn my eye enough to read it without a familiarity with the author.
Published by Tor Nightfire, Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw was released in October 2021. This twisted spin on a haunted house tale takes modern horror-loving twenty-somethings and has them staying in a Heian-era mansion, lured by tales of gory deaths and gruesome ghosts.
The story begins with Cat and her friends arriving at the creepy and decrepit manor so that two of the friends can marry one another, fulfilling one of their childhood dreams of being married in a haunted house. The ghost that is said to live in this remote historic site was said to be a bride herself. Cat and her friends deal with intense personal drama that predates this visit, and that drama serves as almost a distraction for both the characters and the reader until the house and its centuries-old occupants begin to reveal their true natures. As the horror intensifies in a steady build, the story explores race, sexuality, mental illness, the perils of friendship, horror tropes, and Japanese folklore.
While I was drawn to Nothing But Blackened Teeth for the haunted house and Japanese folklore, one of the things that most pulled me in once I had started it is the way that it explored horror tropes. I love horror that gets a little meta, and consider things like Scream and The Cabin In The Woods to be among my favourite horror movies, so reading the ways the characters began to analyse their situation compared to horror stories and tropes they were familiar with really pulled me in. Each of the characters was aware of a role they were expected to play within the story, and they had assumptions about who would live or die depending on those roles. Survivability odds improve with whiteness and decrease with queerness and although Cat is our narrator she is never assumed to be the protagonist by the characters in the story because she is Asian, bisexual, and struggles with mental illness. The characters are from Malaysia, like the author, and only one of them is white, so it was interesting to see whiteness decentred while it still played a role when the characters were calculating who might survive. I think it was especially interesting to see the assumptions the characters made based on tropes and expectations, followed by the ways the story subverted each of those expectations.
The actual haunted house aspect of the story was interesting and creepy. Khaw has a real gift for descriptive language, and the imagery they evoke is stunning. The language falls somewhere between poetry and brutal reality, and it’s hard not to feel like you’re surrounded by ghosts and demons and spirits. I felt like the house might crawl off the page along with the Ohaguro-Bettari and trap me forever, and it’s a great feeling to have while reading horror. Most of my notes and highlighted passages by the end were just my own endless admiration of the descriptive words. I definitely had to google a few Japanese folklore terms as I read, since it’s definitely not an area I’ve spent much time with, but it felt very immersive and it was worth the extra effort to understand all of it. Despite the focus on the supernatural for much of the story, human nature takes over and adds a horror all its own, which adds a unique dimension to the story as well, lending a sense of reality amid the ghostly chaos.
Overall, I feel like Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw was a fascinating and fun story that I couldn’t help but become engrossed in. It blended a lot of my favourite horror fiction elements to create something that felt unique and fresh. I personally recommend checking it out (content warnings at the bottom for those who want or need them). It was one of my own most anticipated reads of the year, and I was definitely a satisfied reader when I got to it. I’ll definitely be exploring more of the author’s work when I have the chance, especially since I enjoyed These Deathless Bones so much as well (which perhaps remains my favourite of the two, but it’s a close call either way).
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw is available for purchase now. It is also available as an audiobook. I received an advanced readers’ copy of this book through NetGalley, which I voluntarily read and reviewed. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Content warnings: graphic violence, mental illness and related ableism, institutionalization, self-harm, mentions of suicide, mild fatshaming, violence against women.