The setting is a Heian-era mansion, the ideal location for a wedding of thrill-seekers. Like many American gothic horror novels, any story that harkens back to the past or ancient times just seems to be that much more horrific than a lot of modern day horror. Two books is enough for me to tell that, there’s no point trying much more.This short novel, NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH, from author Cassandra Khaw packs in some horrifying images and ideas that are all deeply steeped in Japanese folklore. I wonder how much of that is the novella length, how much is the purple prose that means you don’t get a sense of them at all, and how much is just… me having got bored and not bothering to engage because of that second point.Īny which way, what I ended up with was the certainty that Cassandra Khaw is not for me.

They are these prototypes, and very little else. And I think that sums up my feelings about them. There was a point when one made a comment that, the mc being bi and him being ‘comic relief’, they would be the first to die, since the rest were each other archetypes I don’t remember. The characters? None of them really stuck. The worldbuilding? Slightly lost in the purple prose-although not fully, enough that most of what I can say is that it’s a house.

In the end then, is it any surprise I started skimming a little? I can’t tell you a whole lot about this novella because I don’t know a whole lot about it. How am I meant to follow the story, if I can’t tell what’s even happening? That matters less in a horror novella, perhaps, but it’s still irritating as all hell.

Namely, that the purple prose is so strong that you can barely tell what’s supposed to be happening in the scenes. The same sticking points on writing style that plagued me in The All-Consuming World were just as prevalent here. Maybe, I thought, the writing in Khaw’s novel was an outlier. It’s the problem I had with The All-Consuming World, and really, I read this book as a kind of second chance. Cassandra Khaw’s writing, for me, falls into the latter category. There are two types of purple prose writing styles: that which you can get through still, that occasionally you roll your eyes, but it’s still readable, and that which so totally obscures what’s going on in individual scenes and the plot as a whole, that the book itself becomes an unreadable mess.

Nothing but blackened teeth reviews