Interesting concept and introduced me to different folklore concepts. I wish it had been a little bit longer. I would have loved to read a more expanded version of the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

So this book was not my favorite but it was also not bad. It was just okay. This story is a new take on a creepy haunted house with some Japanese folklore added in. The characters were interesting and I enjoyed reading about how they handled a lot of the spooky moments. A problem I ran into with the characters though is that I didn’t have a real connection with any of them which led to me not truly caring about what happened to them.

The main problem I had with this book is how outrageously purple it is! I cannot deal with such lyrical and purple writing. I just can’t. I appreciated the bisexual and Asian representation. The horror was also enjoyable but the writing style just prevented me from truly enjoying this book.

First, this cover is absolutely amazing! Every now and then, I pick up a book based solely on the cover art and this was the case with Nothing But Blackened Teeth. It's absolutely haunting and gothic and a wonderful visual to jump start the story.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a hybrid of literary prose and B movie fan fiction. Khaw is a wordsmith. She knows how to paint a scene, but at times, the descriptions become too involved. I give her credit for coming up with lines like:

"The light plunged through the gap between her lips, and there was only ink and the smell of vinegar, only black teeth."

"Enclosed in Nadia's ribs was an entire vocabulary of sighs, each one layered with delicate subtleties, each laboured exhaulation unique in its etymology."

Lovely, but when every bit of exposition is written with the same grandiose flair, it's simply too much.

While the prose tilts toward literature, the plot is a B horror fan's dream. There's constant references to stereotypical plot points in horror movies, a technique for the characters to not take themselves or the situation too seriously. However, because one character in particular (Lin) keeps pointing out that the events feel like a horror movie unraveling, the story is predictable and the dialog becomes redundant.

Even so, it's a lot of fun. Yes, you'll know what happens before it occurs, but that doesn't make it any less nightmare inducing. The horror elements are masterfully described, and it's a book you'll be able to breeze through in one setting. I recommend giving it a try!

i really enjoyed the writing, but the dialogue took me in and out of the story, unfortunately. I would love to read more of this author's worked though!

A group of friends travel to an abandoned Japanese mansion to celebrate a friend’s wedding and investigate an old ghost tale. This is a fast-paced page-turner and I was invested in finding out what happens until the end. The story is presented in a very visual way. It would be well adapted to a visually stunning horror movie.
Khaw’s abstract writing style was unique and makes for a different reading experience. She crafts words together to create visually stunning images and emotional responses. I liked the descriptions of the location:
“But the interior didn’t smell like it had people here, not for a long, long time, and it smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that’d forgotten what it was like to eat.”
However, the character descriptions could be excessive in a way that did not add to the story, for example:
“The words swayed like a body on a rope, finally slack. Emotional distance reframing that previous incarnation as a stranger, without body or nuance, a monochrome despair decanted into the slumped mouth, a six-month affair with cigarettes and self-loathing.”
Nothing but Blackened teeth is a refreshing, quick read. Despite the style over substance mechanics, the story wraps up satisfyingly. The writing style may not be for everyone, but I found it a unique change of pace. I would recommend this to fans of Eastern horror and those who are interested in artistically rendered stories. Just try not to rot your teeth from the excessive use of sugary metaphors.

Well, that was terrifying.

The prose veers into purple territory in a few places, but in a story of only 128 pages everything goes by quickly and the descriptions that work WILL feature in your nightmares. This is the kind of story that makes it really difficult to have to get up and pee in the middle of the night.

Khaw fills the haunted mansion with yōkai (particularly the ohaguro-bettari, which translated gives the book its very effective title), and Japanese folklore proves to be a deep well to draw from. It's the same well that Samara crawled out of in <i>The Ring</i>. But there is also human evil here that stems from the characters' fear, shame, resentment, and their deep inability to face those feelings even before they're surrounded by monsters.

Read at your own peril.

Received a free copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What a unique and wild ride! I very much enjoyed the Japanese cultural aspects of the story, the diversity, the prose, and the haunt. I don’t quite understand why all of these people even still hang out or see each other since they all dislike each other so immensely, but if you can get past that set up, you get to enjoy the drama and absolute chaos that comes after. The key word here being: chaos.

This book! If you like horror, make sure to add Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw to your TBR pile. Deliciously horrific, this book follows a group of friends who decide to celebrate another's upcoming wedding by renting out an abandoned Heian era mansion in Japan with a sick ghost story... what could go wrong? The writing in this book is descriptive, vivid and GORY. Khaw breaks the tension and paces the story with humor. The characters are so sharp and quick witted, its easy to root for them. Posessions, betrayals and more all wrapped in beautifully poetic writing - - make sure to check this one out!

Well if you want to get married in a haunted house, don't tell me that you aren't entertaining the possibility of this horrifically weird and terrible outcome in the back of your mind, at least a little bit. Sure, things will probably go fine, and yeah I hate my fiance's best friend and I wish she hadn't been invited but I'll try and get past it - but isn't there the tiniest, itty-bittiest chance that things will go horribly wrong and end in bloodshed and and mayhem and extreme grotesquerie? Otherwise what's the point? Khaw is now definitively one of my go-to, read everything they write authors after this sharp, wordy, and very, very bloody little horror that took me an hour to read but made me imagine things that have been stuck in my head for days.

I adored this book from the start. A group of 5 friends, who all really hate each other, are vacationing in Japan, in an ancient haunted mansion. The characters are Cat, Phillip, Faiz, Nadia and Lin. They are there because it is Nadia’s dream to get married at a haunted house. This turns out to be a bad idea.

I enjoyed the shorter length. The creepiness started almost immediately and escalated quickly. The ending was nicely gory. I loved the Japanese setting, but felt that many Japanese words were used that I had no idea what they were. I would have gotten more from the story if there had been explanations.

A group of friends visit a haunted house with a horrifying, dark history. This is the plot of most of my favorite movies and books, so I was thrilled to see how Khaw made this story her own!

I learned so much about Japanese culture from this book, which was a fun surprise.

What I loved the most about this short novel is Khaw’s descriptive prose. The language and writing in this book is gorgeous, giving the story a unique and rich depth. Through Khaw’s masterful writing, Cat, the main character comes alive, and the horror scenes are extremely frightening.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a creepy, quick read that will stay with you.

Thank you Netgalley and Nightfire for the chance to read and review this book!

Looking for a quick read about a haunted house? This novella is just what you need as we count down towards Halloween. The imagery is wonderfully creepy and, thanks to a well-timed bump on the roof of my own house, it managed to make me jump out of my own skin in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

What better wedding surprise could there be than a late night visit to a Heian-era mansion, built on the bones of a bride and the girls sacrificed over the years to keep her company? This must be the third book I've read in recent months about houses built on bones, but in this one it works. The author does a fantastic job of making you feel how cold and lonely the bride is down in the dirt. She uses a lot of Japanese terms and some of them aren't easy to figure out through context clues. I know I was missing details because I wouldn't put the book down long enough to look everything up, but I was okay with that.

3.5 rounded up. This, friends, THIS....was creepy as crap. This is a dark horror circus, right here - think something like The Ring or The Grudge. A group of thrill-seeking, horror story-loving friends gather for a surprise destination wedding....in an isolated, ancient Japanese mansion best known for it's version of the corpse bride and a couple hundred years worth of buried girls sacrificed to keep her sated.

This is a short, blisteringly fast read - coming in at less than 150 pages, you can easily make this a one-sitting read if you have the time. I normally prefer a more slow-burn, gothic, things that go bump in the night type of scary story, so I was quite surprised at how easily I got pulled into the story and how creeped out it made me.

Recommended for fans of dark horror. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to sneak a peak at an early copy!

Nothing But Blackened Teeth - Cassandra Khaw - 5/5

Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and Netgalley for the ARC for review.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a haunted house story that is so beautifully written it set my teeth on edge. I absolutely adored every moment of this gorgeous novella. I so infrequently come across a horror story that makes me gasp at the imagery, not because it’s grim, but because it’s so damn beautiful.

Khaw is a masterful writer. The characters in the novel are just as complex as her folklore. The real horror comes from their relationships, how they interact with one another. It is layered and delicious, and I ate the whole thing up in one sitting and gave it a giant chef’s kiss.

I can’t wait to see what comes next from this author.

After reading Cassandra Khaw's Hammers on Bone, I knew I wanted to read more from this author. So, when NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH hit Netgalley, I snatched it up. The gorgeous cover (I want a copy for my wall) and description had me all aquiver. The fact that it was a short book (only 123 pages) was a lovely find as well. My attention span just doesn't go well over 250 or so right now. Anyways, I dived in, and at first I absolutely adored it. Khaw has an amazing way with words and her turns of phrase in NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH were some of the best I'd ever read... but then, slowly, my attraction to the book started to die as I realized how (to me) excessive the prose was. It was violently, unapologetically purple, in fact. And while I am sure this will thrill some readers, it did not thrill me. And it began to take me a while to process some of the stranger ones as the story went on. Add to that the fact that I really couldn't bring myself to like any of the characters, and it became a potential recipe for disaster that was blessedly saved by how short the book is. I enjoyed it, overall, but absolutely could not have stuck it out if this was a 200+ page read.

A group of friends stay at a Heian-era haunted mansion for a wedding. It immediately beomes clear that the friends have drifted apart and civility is barely holding their disdain in a few of these relationships. The writing in this was gorgeous and it seemed like every sentence was so poetic and purposeful. The imagery was effectively scary, a great mix of Japanese folklore with haunted house elements. Every sentence drips gorgeous, brutal prose. The writing in this book was so strong and beautifully eerie.

There’s no denying that the language and evoked imagery in this is absolutely stunning. This is a properly vivid and creepy tale that hums along at a fast clip. But all the flowery prose flows at the cost of character development. If you approach this narrative like a gorgeously evocative lyrical poem and don’t expect to fully understand the relationships, motivations, and histories within the group of people it focuses on, you’ll have a much easier time of it. Had I known none of the how’s and why’s would quite coalesce—that I’d lose track of who said what or why someone feels a certain way in the space of a couple meandering description-laden sentences—I would’ve abandoned reason and just wrapped myself in the haunting exposition. It’s enough, but all the snippets of backstory and weighted dialogue hint at something more that’s never succinctly explained, and one cannot help but be left wanting. Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the ARC.

Genuine and strong horror here. It's a bit Fatal Frame and ghosts oozing out of an old Heian mansion (that modern youths in love with ghost stories just happen to find their way to), with the associated blood sacrifice rituals from the past that must be echoed in the present to have the only hope of freedom. It's a bit abandoned-cabin-in-the-woods slasher with the youths being five young adults who have tangled and messy relationships and all hate each other just a little. It's even a little bit Ayakashi, with the youkai attacks being based on reasons and motives of their own that have been drawn out due to the roles being played by those being haunted. And it's aware of all of these sources, down to lampshading the bits in a horror movie where x happens, or the bit in a video game where you have to find the solution written down somewhere.

Very well written, very visceral and gorgeous. If there's any flaw it's that, in standard cabin-in-the-woods slasher style, none of these characters are really likeable, and so you spend a whole book with characters you don't enjoy seeing interact. You're put into their crew, and forced to sort of dislike everyone even as you spend time watching their story play out to its horrible conclusion. Of course, in slasher films, that's so that you don't feel bad watching them die, and usually gives you a likeable Final Girl to put your empathy toward instead... but here, much more Japanese horror than Western in how it plays out.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a fantastic, phantasmagorical story. It’s the perfect kind of haunted house story; terrible people meet in a gorgeous house that is steeped in a bloodstained history. It won’t take long to read, but the imagery and dread will stay with you long after you finish the book. Khaw can paint a picture with her writing like few other authors can, with a mix of purple prose and sharp sentences crafting the perfect nightmare experience. I’ve already been recommending the book to people who enjoy horror, and I look forward to reading it again when it’s in print.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth appealed to me because of the Japanese folklore aspect of the story. There were a lot of terms I needed to look up so that I knew what was being referenced, and I liked that I could read a scary story while also learning about folklore from another country. I read through this pretty quickly and I'm impressed with Khaw's writing style. The way she describes the emotions of the main character were realistic and raw. The descriptions of the supernatural and gory elements were unsettling. This is a great example of gothic horror set within Eastern culture. Lots of death and decay, a haunted mansion setting, eerie ghosts and spirits.

I kind of wished that this was a full novel rather than a novella because I wanted to know more about these characters lives and the history attached the the mansion they were staying in. I personally find stories more disturbing when there is a longer build up, but for its length the story was able to give you enough information to make it interesting and had a decent conclusion. I'd like to see Khaw turn this into a longer work, or perhaps write a different novel with similar folklore elements.