THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS

Freshly grieving her mother’s death, a therapist buys a new home with her inheritance and gets more than she bargained for.

Eleanor Fan is a therapist relegated to working in online platforms. Forced out of a promising career as a psychology researcher after having been assaulted by her graduate school mentor, she allowed her mother, Lele, to help her pick up the pieces of her life. Eleanor knows that their relationship was codependent, but she has long felt incapable of the inner strength her adult life demands. (Of the two of them, Eleanor thinks, “With their flesh stripped away, she imagined Lele’s skeleton made of steel, and hers of the chalky sugar in candy hearts, something that dissolved in the mouth and crumbled when pressed.”) So when Lele dies of cancer and leaves her a small inheritance with instructions to buy a home, Eleanor obeys her mother’s wishes. The only thing she can afford, though, is a model home in a stalled-out housing development perched above a rainy valley far outside the city. Isolated and neighborless, the house both thrills and frightens Eleanor with its blank-slate quality. When she learns more about the housing development’s history, the haunted feeling Eleanor was experiencing after her mother’s death suddenly becomes much more than a metaphor. Home buying as horror story has become a beloved trope—and readers will note that Eleanor shares more than merely a first name with Shirley Jackson’s most famous visitor to Hill House. But the story moves, like a ghost, through multiple dimensions: Eleanor’s grief, her helplessness in the face of grown-up responsibilities, the trauma of her assault, and the overwhelm of dealing with suffering patients. Real hauntings, like real life, are never simple. Fu captures that with memorable elegance.

Highbrow horror that’s still a page-turner.