Ghost Town

August 8, 2022
Chen (Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies) offers a haunting if overstuffed drama of a Taiwanese family’s efforts to rise out of poverty. After Keith Chen arrives back in Yongjing, having spent a decade in prison in Germany for killing his lover, T, he reunites with his older sisters Beverly, Betty, and Belinda during the monthlong annual Ghost Festival, in which residents leave out offerings for the dead. Each sibling, as well as supporting characters, takes desperate measures to improve their lives. Beverly, the eldest, gets pregnant by the gambler Little Gao. Betty runs errands for the owners of the Tomorrow Bookstore before it gets shut down by the police for selling banned books. Belinda has an abusive husband and, in one poignant episode, visits Keith in prison. These strands, along with flashbacks of Keith’s relationship with T in Berlin, have a sort of stuttered pacing, but Chen does a great job creating atmosphere. A hot bowl of soup “smell like a snake, silently slithering around your ankle, up your leg, around your waist,” and termites “nibbl with fervid desperation.” Eventually, Chen gets into the nightmarish details around T’s killing, but it takes too long to bring everything together. Though vivid, this ambitious novel is a bit too unwieldy.

Starred review from September 1, 2022
Released from prison after having murdered his boyfriend, T., Chen returns from Berlin to his small, rural hometown in central Taiwan. Ironically, he arrives in Yongjing during Ghost Festival, when the Gate of Hell is wide open, signaling that there have been hellish elements in Chen's life and in his five sisters' lives, too. The novel moves back and forth from the present to the seemingly omnipresent past, examining Chen's past as a gay man--leading up to the revelation of why he killed T.--and the stories of his four older sisters, Beverly, Betty, Belinda, and Barbie. Chen's younger sister, Plenty, committed suicide some years back but is now present as a ghost, as is their dead father. The two ghosts tell their own stories, providing backstory and commentary. Author Kevin Chen has done a masterful job of managing his material, creating multidimensional characters, a beautifully realized setting, and an apposite surprise ending. Meanwhile, Chen and his family's stories are uniformly interesting, and seamless in their portrayal of the characters' intersecting lives. The author's afterword notes that he always wanted to write a ghost story; this resulting book is excellent.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022

At once vibrant and tartly observant, Chen's tour de force--a Taiwan Literature Award winner--reveals how we all hold onto the ghosts of the past. After his release from a Berlin prison for having killed his boyfriend T, Keith Chen returns to his backwater Taiwanese hometown, arriving in time for the all-important Ghost Festival. At first, he sees only the bright flowers, but we know from the expertly unfolded stories that it's not a happy place. Elder brother Keith was mayor and then imprisoned, sister Beverly sews clothing for Europeans she can't afford herself, Belinda is married to an abusive news anchor, troubled Barbie hides in her home, and Betty, a household registrar in Taipei, is attacked following accusations that she's not seeing-eye dog--friendly. The mystery of bodacious sister Plenty's suicide sums up the family's pain. "The cruelest people weren't your homeroom teacher or the police. It was us," says the ghost of Keith's father. Driven out for his sexuality, Keith seems to have been happy with handsome blond cellist T, whose death is the question mark driving the narrative. VERDICT A highly recommended story of past, identity, and family.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2022
A haunted family saga from a winner of the Taiwan Literature Award for Books. "It's Ghost Festival today, the Day of Deliverance. The ghosts are coming. I've come back, too." This is what Keith Chen says to his lover as Keith stands in front of the house where he grew up. Or, rather, this is what Keith would say if his lover were by his side--if his lover was still alive. Keith is returning to his backward, backwater hometown after spending time in a German prison for killing that lover. He's seeking memories, but not all of the memories he encounters are welcome ones, and he and his family are surrounded by unquiet spirits--and, although still living, are unquiet spirits themselves, haunting their own lives. Running beneath the whole narrative is the secret story of the death of Keith's lover. The ideas that Chen (the author, not the character) is playing with are familiar to anyone who has read Gothic literature--from Wuthering Heights to Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). And there are moments when Chen creates a truly eerie atmosphere. One of the many characters who narrates this novel--himself a ghost--describes all of Yongjing awakening as his wife and the other women of the town chant during an impromptu morning ritual: "The ghosts in the public cemetery all woke up, too, as did the weeds, the tree snags, and the fallowed fields, along with the molds, the rice stalks, and the wildflowers. All the living, the dead, and the living who wished they were dead in that small town were woken rudely up." But, despite the diversity of narrators, there isn't much diversity of voice--a lack of interiority makes it difficult to distinguish one character from another--and most of this story is told in a flat, expository style that is, ultimately, wearying. There is something initially powerful in the way that Chen presents cruelty as commonplace, but this stylistic choice quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. It seems likely that most readers will either become anesthetized to the brutality or simply quit reading. Chen's exploration of generational trauma is both too much and not enough.

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