At the midpoint of Nothing But Blackened Teeth, one of the members of the friend group that’s running around a haunted Japanese mansion turns to the narrator to warn her that “this is literally the part where the supporting cast dies horribly. You’re bisexual. I’m the comic relief. It’s going to be one of us.”
Cassandra Khaw’s horror novella is strewn with such metacommentaries, some more creative and comical than others. One character takes the entire group in search of a library because “There has to be a book. There’s always a book.” When he finds a book, he peers at a page that appears to one onlooker as “black scratches made by an alien hand” and to another as “just mold” and conjures a ritual from God knows where that involves him pulling out one of his teeth by hand.
A reader could be excused for rolling their eyes at this tired trope of observing tropes. But stay with the story long enough, and it becomes clear that the trope has a purpose. First, it lets the reader catch his or her breath amid Khaw’s unrelenting narrative momentum. Second, it allows the characters to simplify a situation growing more chaotic by the minute.
The narrator, Cat, and four friends she grew up with in “melting-pot Malaysia” have rented out an isolated Heian-period mansion to conduct a surprise elopement for two of the group’s members. The mansion’s gruesome backstory is part of the appeal: A woman was to be married there, only to have her groom die en route. To wait for him, she buried herself alive beneath the foundation, and every year, a new woman was buried in the walls of the house “because it gets lonely down there in the dirt.” The novella is less preoccupied with exposition than it is with atmospherics, which puts an intense spin on “reading the room.”
I couldn’t shake the idea of an eminently practical family, one that understood that bone won’t rot where wood might, ordering their workers to stack girls like bricks. Arms here, legs there, a vein of skulls weaved into the manor’s framing. They were there for the long haul. One day, these doors would open, and wedding guests would pour through, and there would be a marriage, come the cataclysm or modern civilization.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth is filled with ghosts, rendered vividly by Khaw’s lean and adjective-strewn prose — “the red of her rosebud mouth, the lacquered black of her hair.” But the supernatural presence becomes reduced in comparison to the earthly drama that intrudes upon its territory. Those rote horror commentaries become dependent upon a more contemporary situation, in which the horror emanates from an unlikely source.
Modern horror has made a staple of the clique that can barely function as a unit when the pressure is on. But even by the genre’s standards, these characters are especially ill-suited to each other. They present a wreckage of petty grievances, bad decisions, lingering jealousies, and barely suppressed animosities. All mutual, all festering. “[Talia] and I made eye contact as the boys bantered,” Khaw writes, “their voices prickling like the hackles of a Doberman, short and stark, animosity panting between the niceness, and Talia’s expression congealed with dislike.” Their one binding agent seems to be an affinity for the morbid, which is put to strain as the friends with toxic energy meet the house with the threatening aura.
Blackened Teeth shares traits with what has been called “humanistic horror.” Following a brief, probably regrettable sojourn with Lovecraftian nihilism, mass audiences are returning to a manner of horror that prefers the intimate to the cosmic and is unashamed to be sentimental and overt where being bleak and elliptical is the path of least resistance. Its examples are all over the genre and span decades, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King being the most obvious, though lately, its most prominent banner-waver is Mike Flanagan of Midnight Mass fame. What is smaller in scope and less aloof in style will logically bring the horror right to one’s nose. It is “domesticity as interpreted through the lens of the demonic,” to borrow one of Khaw’s own phrases.
In terms of style, Blackened Teeth could not be more antithetical to Flanagan’s saccharine, glacier-paced redemption narratives. Khaw doesn’t so much write action as press a linguistic accelerator. The efficiency, propelled by natural but carefully honed dialogue, perhaps owes to the author’s work in video game screenwriting. There are no lulls or digressions, no overlong pauses to divulge background or rationalize some phenomena. Khaw’s narrative prose is a distinctive welding of the metaphors of Raymond Chandler (“The floorboards throbbed like they had a heart carved into their grain.”) and the viscera of Clive Barker. Like a literary doomsday prepper, Khaw hoards vast quantities of vocabulary and wastes none of it.
Yet in substance, there isn’t much that distinguishes the novella from any Netflix product. Horror is the friends you make along the way. What haunts you is your baggage. Any supernatural element is bound to serve as an amplifier rather than an antagonist or intruder. “I looked over. The ohaguro-bettari [black-toothed ghost] was smiling like an ingénue at her first soiree, a blood-soaked husband on the horizon.” At other times, otherworldly apparitions feel like audience surrogates. “Maybe all the yokai [spirits] wanted was for us to panic, kick around a few old books, cry, then they’d let us out.” It doesn’t quite pan out that way, what with characters that bring an attitude that assures no other outcome. “I hope this house eats you,” one character tells Cat, to which she responds, “I hope the same about you.”
Bringing horror down from the abyss and back into our domestic worries, our vulnerabilities, and our relationships has an obvious appeal. It’s supposed to show that the genre and its fans can grow up. It’s horror’s equivalent to Thirtysomething. But like all trends, its guiding themes are only as valuable as the talents putting them to use. Khaw’s storytelling prowess is more than formidable, even if the ultimate takeaway of Nothing But Blackened Teeth is that not even a ghost can break the toxic bond of a group text that no one remembers joining but no one knows how to leave — at least without killing someone.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
