Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a surreal Japanese ghost story-themed nightmare told with lush descriptive language and very spooky imagery. The unreliable narrator, dramatic personalities of the main characters, and strangeness of the set-up occasionally made it difficult to follow the action. This is especially true in the second half when some of the characters begin to speak about their predicament in an almost self-aware way. I think I probably would have liked a little more development of the characters, particularly more about their shared pasts as I think that could have given the ghostly encounters more weight. That said, the book has a real immediacy and the emotions of the characters come through loud and clear.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth tells the story of a group of friends who come to a haunted mansion of sorts in Japan so two of them can get married. Then, all hell breaks loose. A dead bride steals the living bride away. Friends fight over long-ago disputes. And people come apart, literally and physically.

The story is fantastic, but the book barrels along at a clip that doesn’t let up. We meet the characters quickly, then learn immediately how their pasts connect. And then the spooky stuff pours in. What I wanted was more length, more space for details to cook, but what I didn’t receive anything bad either. I just wanted MORE.

If you want to dip into the world of Cass Khaw, give it a go. You’ll end up at the end of this begging for more.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is the story of a group of five “friends” who travel to Japan, as two of them are getting married. Faiz and Nadia are set on having a borderline sacrilegious wedding ceremony an abandoned Heian-era mansion that turns out to be haunted. However, little does the party know that this is a house that yearns for blood. You see, the "friends "are a complicated group who are constantly bickering and fighting, and the house, and the yokai who haunt it don't have time for their crap. The mansion is known for being built on the bones of a bride who took a maiden sacrifice with her for many years. So basically these Ohaguro-Bettari are ready for another sacrifice and the new bride to be will do just nicely.

This was a good ghost story full of Japanese folklore. It was quite atmospheric too. Khaw's writing can be a little dense at times but is always eloquent. There were many lines that I drooled over and wondered "wow, that was such a fascinating way to write that sentence." However, at times I found Khaw's prose to be a tad bit overindulgent and this distracted me from the plot of the story.

This being said, this novella is still worth reading, especially if you're a fan of ghost stories, haunted houses, and Japanese folklore.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for providing me with the eARC.

Also, as many have mentioned, that Ohaguro-Bettari cover is sooooo creepy! Love it!

This book was so fucking scary. What an incredible piece of work. This was a terrifying horror story, truly a work of art in the genre. It twisted common horrors with new concepts that haunt you long after the page.

This book wasn't what I was hoping it would be. Maybe if it were a novel and not a novella it would have gripped me more.

“I hope the house eats you.”

This is a gorgeously written story. It’s dark, edgy, and perfectly grotesque.

Our characters are so very wrong. Our house is so very wrong. And the things that may dwell within it are so very dangerously wrong.

The writing style is blade sharp. Each sentence seems to have been very carefully created in order to cut you right to the heart.

And, at its heart, it’s still a horror story. Ghostly, heartbreaking, and utterly compelling. It stays with you.

5 stars

*ARC via Net Galley

A very scary, ominous and dark horror story. A group of people gather in a reportedly haunted abandoned mansion and encounter some difficulties between themselves and then encounter a more problematic spirit that throws any semblance of normality out the window. If readers aren't entirely familiar with the supernatural folklore that this story draws on to create its terror, they will still find this to be a chilling read.

I really liked the main character, Cat. And, I genuinely liked all the male characters, even though Phillip was pretty douchee. (Can I say that in a review?) I did NOT expect that it would end the way it did. I definitely thought they were all going to die, and Cat would become the new ghost-bride.

The only thing I think could have been improved upon was sometimes, it was slightly confusing what was happening. This is NOT because of the Japanese words within the text... it was more like there was so much description that the creepy doings of the house and the actions of the characters became jumbled together.

I’m not sure if it’s because this is an ARC copy and the formatting needs to be a bit polished up, but the writing style, structure, and voice is so so confusing and I couldn’t follow it. I ended up giving up.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a quickly read ghost story steeped in Japanese and Asian folklore.
"A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company."
Or so the legend is told when a group of friends arrive at the mansion for a wedding and some reminiscing, but not all is right with the friends or with the house as a night that should be for celebration turns into a memorable night of haunting things.

First off, I really enjoyed this novella. There are not a lot of moments I see the word chiaroscuro in my regular life. As much as I enjoyed the story and the amazing literary way it was written, I do think the metaphors and descriptions were a bit...bloated. I wanted more from the ohaguro-bettari and her Yokai gang, but I do commend Khaw for really going all in on the descriptions, and interruptions, that open each scene. The way she weaves the main character's mental health issues with the haunting and the characters' inter-personal issues, can feel a bit blurry and confusing, but I found that seemed almost intentional once I reached the end of the story. Overall, I found Nothing But Blackened Teeth to be a very creepy and visceral novella that I will remember for years to come. I will
be handing this book to every horror fan I know!

Five friends visit an old, haunted Japanese mansion to perform a wedding ceremony for two of their party. They soon find out that the house is glad that they've arrived, and how much of a problem that is about to be for them.

Cassandra Khaw has created an interesting narrative, complex characters, and a scary story all in the space of a novella. In fact, she manages to pack so much into the narrative that the explanatory asides and metaphors take the reader out of the flow of the story more than once. She's also particularly brutal and gory in her descriptions of the house, its monsters, and the group of five. Ultimately, I don't overly enjoy haunted house tales and this one was no exception, but I wouldn't want to discourage anyone who might enjoy a good haunted house story.

I loved the premise of this one, but unfortunately it fell flat for me. I expected far more chills and scares, but the story spent so long on the interpersonal dramas between the characters that I never felt it gave the reader what was promised by the blurb. The pacing was also inconsistent.

This is a book I would recommend to those with specific tastes-- emphasis on tone and atmosphere of a story, rather than grounded characters and plot, and those who love flowery prose. I personally do enjoy the latter but not so much the former, so it didn't work as much for me as Khaw's other novella, however still an enjoyable time and for those looking for spooky "vibes" would do well to check it out.

Semi-estranged ghost-obsessed friends (frenemies?) gather at a haunted mansion for a wedding, and bad things happen. The prose was a bit overwrought for my taste, but Khaw is definitely a master at evoking character and setting. Even in this short read, I felt like I knew exactly who the characters were and the setting was richly horrifying. A definite recommendation for anyone looking for a quick unsettling read.

I knew I had to read this book the second that I laid eyes on it, the cover is nightmare fuel and the prospect of a haunted house in a Heian-era mansion complete with a tragic urban legend was too good to pass up. The Ohaguro-bettari, literally translating to Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a faceless yokai dressed in a wedding kimono known for luring in single men. What an incredible subject for a ghastly horror story, there is something inherently creepy about a faceless ghost with only one feature, a mockingly sinister smile.

The story centers on a group of “friends” who travel to Japan for a marriage ceremony, the thrill-seekers rent a mansion in hopes of supernatural spooks over nuptials. To call any of the attendee’s friends though is a stretch, the relational dynamics between every character oozed toxicity and the thinly veiled loathing between them just screams disaster. The Ohaguro-bettari was truly a terrifying entity, it was every bit a faithful adaptation of the malevolent trickster spirit. The setting is incredibly atmospheric, I blazed through this story in one sitting on the edge of my seat from start to finish.

While the story starts off well, it stumbles a few times in the middle of the book. While the petty drama of the group was intense, I also found the addition of humor to be disjointing, and it broke my immersion in the story. I was blown away by the major appearance of the spirit, only to sign when one of the characters immediately cracks a joke about ghost fucking.

I was thrown off when the story seemed to shift focus away from the yokai, and I had to take time to think about how I wanted to write about this book when I finished. My initial reaction was mixed, but the more I thought about it and made connections between the selection of this particular yokai and the character drama the more I appreciated it. While this story didn’t quite nail it for me, I really admire Khaw’s lush style of writing, it is so uniquely her own and I would love to read more of her work.

The second I saw this book’s cover floating around on social media, I just knew that I needed to get my hands on it. Not to mention that I’m a sucker for Japanese horror, so a haunted house thrill ride in Japan? Count me in.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is the story of a group of five “friends” (I use the term very loosely here) as two of them are getting married. Faiz and Nadia are set on having a borderline sacrilegious wedding ceremony in a haunted house so when the trust-fund friend, Phillip, fronts the money for everyone to go to a decrepit old mansion in the middle of nowhere, Japan, it’s all perfect. When the story’s narrator, Cat, presents a main source of tension and her friend, Lin, as well, things go from zero to one hundred really fast. This is a house that yearns for blood.

After reading this novella in a single sitting, though, I found myself a touch disappointed. Perhaps I went in with my expectations set to high but the weirdest thing about my mixed feelings is that I want both more and less out of it.

Cassandra Khaw has a meticulous style that is flowery and explicit simultaneously. In some places, she has the most on-point descriptions of yokai, ghosts, and gore. In other’s the wordiness detracts from the story, the terms requiring google definitions (and this from someone who thought he had a pretty large vocabulary…) to understand what was being said. I loved the descriptions of the house itself and of the ghost, but what was majorly lacking was context. What happened to Cat that locked her away? Why is Nadia so hateful towards her? Why does no one like Lin if he seems just as successful as Phillip? How are any of these horrible people friends?

I’m all for messy people being messy, but the depth was lacking and the book turned into more of an 88-minute horror film one watches with friends while drunk and everyone tries to guess who dies first simply to move things along.

Will I read more of Khaw’s work? Absolutely. Sadly this one was just most of a miss from me.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I don’t discourage anyone from reading this book.

In fact, let’s support spec-fic authors of colour and READ THEIR WORK! For all that I didn’t personally enjoy Nothing But Blackened Teeth, I think there will be folks out there who absolutely will, as evidenced by several rave reviews already.

So let’s get right into things. The prose in this novella is ridiculously, outrageously, unapologetically purple.

It is EXCESSIVE, y’all.

Part of me admires Khaw for committing so fully to such overindulgence. But overall, I have to be honest and say that I did not enjoy the writing in this novella. Why? For the very reason purple prose sucks: the flowery adjectives and over-the-top metaphors kept taking me out of the story, detracting more than they contributed.

(For example, I thought that the ohaguro-bettari at the heart of this story—and plastered across its INCREDIBLE cover—was too metaphorical, amorphous, messy for my tastes, and that goes for her yōkai minions, too. I get that this was probably a deliberate decision on Khaw's part, but it just didn't work for me. I'm not really a fan of storylines that devolve into chaos.)

Mind you, these things aren’t bad on their own. I love me an uncommon word, an unconventional turn of phrase. I applaud Khaw’s allergy to cliché (at least, in terms of her actual prose; see discussion of characters below for some qualifications).

But my issue is that it was just so. damn. much. Some of the flowery metaphors and weird words worked beautifully; some of them didn’t—like, at all. The book thus wavers between 1) a visceral vividness that engages all your senses, and 2) just plain distracting.

I think I could’ve given this 3 stars if I’d felt some degree of connection to the characters, but I just didn’t. Nothing But Blackened Teeth revolves around a friend group defined by their major beef with one another. We are never told explicitly about said beef, however, though it is hammered into you over and over again that they’ve incestuously all been in love or lust with each other at some point in the past, and now they all feel salty about it.

In all, it’s VERY hard to feel in the loop, and even more impossible to care about what basically amounts to petty squabbling between the friends.

Though Khaw’s prose itself wasn’t cliché, the characters ended up feeling like clichés. The flowery language imbued the book’s characters—and their many messy romantic entanglements—with a sense of canned melodrama more befitting a cringe-worthy soap opera than supernatural horror novella.

The casual rep was great, though. Cat, our narrator, is bisexual and Chinese, raised in Malaysia. Lin is also Chinese. Nadia is part Bengali and part Telegu, Faiz is half-Japanese, and Phillip is white (a fact that the others often rag on, which was pretty freakin’ entertaining).

Indeed, I thought the ending redeemed the novella for me; that was a nice inversion of tropes.

Bottom line: Nothing But Blackened Teeth was too decadently purple for me, but I would still absolutely recommend that you read this creepy story to make that call for yourselves.



Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this book, but I could not get over the clunky language. It was as if the book had been translated from poetry by an academic with little flair for popular writing. I am a fan of language and imagery, but when they pull me out of the narrative to impress me with their cleverness or specificity, I find myself disengaging from the text altogether.

This was an extremely quick read! I love Japanese folklore and horror, so a combination of the two provided an enjoyable experience in the span of one evening. My only complaint: it was a tad predictable. This could be due to the fact that I widely consume horror movies, TV shows, and books.

The cover of this book pulled me in 100%. I wish I could say that I enjoyed the story the same. This is a quick read of 128 pages, and there were times when reading that I had high hopes for some literary scares, but ultimately, the story fell flat. For me, reading this story was like reading a movie tie-in novel to a horror film. As a movie, this story would definitely have some scares but the development of the characters left much to be desired. Khaw's writing is beautiful though. There are many passages that are lyrical and eloquent.