Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw Review (Novella, 2021) #31DaysOfHorror
content warning: foul language, mental wellness, blood, gore
A group of friends are getting ready for a wedding. They rented out a beautiful mansion in Japan believed to house a dark past. Legend has it a bride abandoned on her wedding day insisted on being buried alive in the foundation of the house, refusing to give up her promise to wait for her groom until he returned. Every year, a new woman was buried with her in the walls to appease the spirit. Cat becomes obsessed with every possible horror in the house, convinced that nothing good could ever come from staying in a haunted mansion.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a haunted house novella from Cassandra Khaw. It is a narrative told in the first person by Cat, a woman just emerging from a severe bout of depression. The depression left her isolated from everyone she loved for six months, unable to leave her house. The friends she travels with to Japan for the wedding are the ones who supported her until she could finally step outside again.
Cat’s role in the story is an interesting one. She is the narrator and a participant in the disturbing events, but she’s passive to the core. The events happen around her as she anticipates something will go wrong. She is the only one to hear the whispered words in the mansion, “suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu,” and uses her studies in Japanese literature to identify every possible threat in the house.
Khaw’s prose is fast-paced and dense, using a rich vocabulary of perfectly specific descriptors and a knowledge of Japanese folklore to establish the threat of the haunted mansion. Everything becomes dark, heavy, and confusing once the friends step inside the bride’s eternal home. The building is falling apart around them and only Cat can see through the joy of the wedding to notice the rot.
Haunted house stories often serve as a metaphor for a problem in the protagonist’s life. In Nothing But Blackened Teeth, the protagonist’s main problem is the code to the cipher.
Cat is already not feeling great about traveling to the wedding at all with this combination of people. Phillip is her ex-boyfriend, and he also used to date Talia, the bride. Talia doesn’t even pretend to like Cat, and Faiz, the groom, is just trying to keep the peace. Lin is Cat’s closest friend, but she hasn’t seen him since she had to be hospitalized for her depression. The circumstances aren’t ideal for a destination wedding to begin with.
Then they arrive at the decrepit mansion and Cat looks beyond the romance to the obvious signs of a haunting. Everyone else views the local myth of the buried bride as a fun challenge; Cat sees it as a threat. The walls being covered in images of Japanese spirits and demons doesn’t exactly help. Anytime Cat raises a concern, she’s shot down for derailing the mood like always. Cat’s distance from the group let’s her see beyond the wedding to what she knows will happen in this mansion.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a fast and challenging read. The story moves quickly even when you might have to pause to figure out (or even look up) Khaw’s precise verbiage to understand what’s really going on. The novella becomes quite extreme in the climax, but the gore isn’t lingered on; the terror is.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth is available in eBook, hardcover, and audiobook forms.
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