Home Is Where the Horror Is

After a brief bout with an aggressive cancer, Eleanor Fan’s mother, Lele, has died. The two had been inseparable, with the former working as a therapist and the latter managing many of her daughter’s professional and personal affairs. Upended by the loss of such a vital force in her life, Eleanor is determined to fulfill her mother’s last wish: to use her modest inheritance to buy her first home.

After being outbid on a series of questionable houses she can barely afford, Eleanor is taken to a stunning model home in a cleared valley, “the ground scraped clean of the ancient trees and everything that had sheltered within, sterile as salted earth.” Built on “a vast trapezoid of razed land,” it has coveted eleven-foot ceilings and floors of polished concrete and engineered hardwood. There is only one other vacant residence nearby; Eleanor is told that the proposed community’s original developer has gone bankrupt and that a new one will be resuming construction the following summer.

“You know I’m not going to be able to find you another house that looks remotely like this,” the real estate agent tells the therapist. Still wading through her grief, Eleanor is pressured to waive the inspection. She impulsively purchases the too-good-to-be-true property, a hasty decision that will further derail her life.

Even before Eleanor moves into her mysterious new home, it is clear that she is haunted. A sexual assault she endured in grad school, committed by a man in a position of power who never faced justice, lingers in her memory, as does the knowledge that the incident played a large part in her abnormal dependence on her mother. “You just study,” Lele said. “You help people like you always wanted. I’ll take care of everything else.” The department was less supportive, pushing Eleanor to settle for a master’s degree instead of finishing her doctorate.

Eleanor has barely been holding it together, and predictably the cracks begin to show — both literally and metaphorically — as soon as she starts to unpack. An intense storm reveals just how shoddy her dream house really is; it fails first in small, inconvenient ways and eventually disintegrates to the point of becoming uninhabitable.

“The rain, in the morning, had turned violent,” Fu writes, “now crashing upon the skylights as though trying to break through. Wind drove the water sideways, lashing against the windows.” During the onslaught, Eleanor attempts to continue her online therapeutic practice, with mixed results, while interrupted by a parade of workers charged with fixing various structural problems. The repair costs accumulate to the point where the total bill no longer seems real, just a series of impossible numbers with no chance of being paid.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is a taut and affecting ghost story, employing familiar horror elements in a wholly refreshing way. The relentless downpour brings with it a sense of ominous dread, but so do Eleanor’s interactions with anyone connected to her property, including the various contractors who attempt to mend the doors, walls, and windows. Even the cashier at the grocery store reveals part of the development’s dark history, including the death of its first builder. “She had been trying to help Eleanor, to warn her,” Fu writes. “But in Eleanor’s sympathy for a man hounded to suicide by an angry mob, she had apparently misunderstood, missed something important.”

Eleanor’s clients soon begin to feel like a malevolent force, distant unknowable figures separated by a screen, their animosity growing as everything falls apart around her. In her intense solitude, she perceives “their flat, pixelated, quarter-scale heads and truncated bodies, their scratchy voices that echoed off walls in faraway rooms.” And as they divulge their problems, fears, and anxieties to her, there is a genuine sense that she could be anyone — or, perhaps more correctly, that she is no one at all.

Events devolve into a predictable but no less terrifying nightmare, as Eleanor’s space becomes an emotional and physical threat. “The paint around the leaking windows had bubbled, the outer layer sagging like the skin of a popped blister,” Fu writes of the disarray. “The baseboards under her bedroom window and the window at the top of the stairs were loosening from the wall, swollen with water, bending outward like the hoops of a barrel.”

Horror as a metaphor for grief is not a new theme, but while The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is certainly preoccupied with the deep wound Eleanor carries in the wake of both her violation and her mother’s death, Fu has managed to invoke something far more complex than a mere physical manifestation of her protagonist’s sadness. When Lele begins to appear to her daughter, the apparition is meant not as a ghostly jump scare but as an inevitability built out of their intense, suffocating, and enduring codependency.

“Already Eleanor felt inured to this vision, resigned to her mind’s persistent conjuring,” Fu writes. “Lele off to the side, always there, appearing suddenly in rooms as she had in Eleanor’s thoughts. Was it so different, she thought, from how she’d already been living?”

With her third novel, Fu has expertly built a sense of both real and surreal chaos in what should be the safety and security of the home. The physical fractures and intrusions mirror the slow dissolution of Eleanor’s sanity, the loss of her ability to stay connected — to her clients, to her ex-lover, to the workmen who wander in and out but never really seem to accomplish anything.

As this impactful narrative builds to a climax, domestic invasions and disintegrations offer an unnerving reflection of one person’s unravelling. She feels disregard from so many — whether subtle, from the insurance company that says there is nothing it can do; menacing, from the man who services her front door lock with a weighted threat; or severe, from the powerful professor who assaulted her on his office floor. The barrage renders Eleanor a woman undone by both tiny and monumental slights. The stunning conclusion sees her refusing to “be led away, back into the dream of Lele’s care, into death, into memory, into perpetual childhood, waiting for a savior who would never come.” Instead, she is ready to move forward, into the danger of her own liberation, defiantly letting go of everything that has held her down.