Japanese Gothic
Kylie Lee Baker's Japanese Gothic is a folk horror novel about a man on the run after a murder and a young samurai in exile, living a century and a half apart in the same Japanese house. Grief, family cruelty and a steady stream of second-guessing drive it.
From the review
Japanese Gothic keeps the reader a half step off balance, and it means to. Animals won't go near the house. A bedroom window sometimes quits being a window. After dark, a sword-carrying woman shows up in the yard. Kylie Lee Baker stacks small wrongnesses like these until trust in the narration wears thin, then keeps stacking. This folk horror novel runs on second-guessing. Every reassurance feels like a setup, and the book knows it. The cast is two people and one house. Lee Turner has killed the man he shared a dorm room with in New York, and he can't say how or why. He bolts for his father's new home in Japan, a place hidden behind sword ferns. In 1877, Sen is in that house too: a young samurai in exile, ducking imperial soldiers, answering to a father whose rage she can never predict and whose approval she still craves. A foreign man turns up outside her window, and she reads him as an omen. One of these two is a ghost. The reader's suspicion swings between them for most of the book, and neither narrator is a safe place to stand.
Read the full review →As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.
