Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Nothing but Blackened Teeth is the latest horror novella by author Cassandra Khaw (author of two prior lovecraftian subversion horror novellas). I've had mixed feelings in my reading of Khaw's works - on one hand, their works are very much driven by descriptions and a style of prose that I haven't loved, often finding it unnatural and stilted - on the other hand, I really really loved the themes and characters in their last work, The All-Consuming World (see my review here). So when many writers I really respect were praising this new horror release, I decided to give it a try, despite it likely not going to be in my wheelhouse.
And well, the result was very much what I expected, with this story being a short horror novella that very much relies on descriptions to set the atmosphere (not really my thing) for its horrors - horrors that are mostly a group of friends with substantial issues between them - jealousy, privilege, depression, and abandonment - when pressed by the supernatural....in this case a supernatural built from Japanese mythology. The relationships are done really well, and so if you like atmospheric horror a bit more than me, this will really work for you.
Trigger Warning: Depression.
Quick Plot Summary: Coming off 6 months of treatment alone due to mental illness, Cat finds her group of friends in different places - Lin has gone off and gotten married without checking in on her, Phillip still thinks he can fix things with money and an apology, and good friend Faiz is about to get married to Talia, the girl Lin tried to break him apart from. So when Phillip uses his white billionaire inherited wealth to send the five of them to a haunted Japanese mansion for the wedding - Cat feels tremendous stress and tension in the air. A tension that will only be exacerbated when the mansion's haunted bride makes her move, and yokai swirl around them, and force them to make choices for their own lives......
Thoughts: Again, Nothing but Blackened Teeth was never going to work for me as well as others, as a lot of what makes it work are Khaw's descriptions of the atmosphere of the mansion and its hauntings as it comes alive - and really such descriptions are often wasted on me (I just can't focus and envision them). But if you like those things, they seem to be done well and others definitely have loved them.
What does still work for me is how Khaw portrays the relations between the characters, which wind up forming the basis for the real horror. Poor protagonist Cat spent six months getting treatment for mental illness (implied essentially to be depression), which wasn't helped by some of the ways her friends responded to her - rich privileged Phillip ghosted her to end a relationship, actual friend Faiz stayed together with a girl Talia who Cat expressed publicly he should break up with (resulting in Talia hating her)...and the one she was closest to, Lin, responded to her treatment by never showing up to support her, and instead moving on with his life and getting married. Really all of the group is fucked up in their relationships - Cat has gripes and loves with all of them that she can't intertwine, Faiz has a jealous streak for the fact that Talia once hooked up with Phillip (and may have during their relationship), Talia has the same jealous streak against Cat for having once dated Faiz (despite Cat telling her that it was a relationship that never worked), and Lin being utterly callous towards the rest sometimes even as he sees how things are going wrong. Oh and Phillip is blinded by his rich white privilege to even see that things could be going wrong.
So yeah, I won't spoil how, but naturally these relationships, aided by the supernatural, go horribly horrorfully wrong, and if you like horror, you'll enjoy how this is pulled off here (especially again if the atmosphere enhances it all). So this will definitely work for others really well, even if it didn't fully for me.
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