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. Cassandra Khaw’s writing, for me, falls into the latter category.

This, in all honesty, I saw coming. It’s the problem I had with The All-Consuming World, and really, I read this book as a kind of second chance. Maybe, I thought, the writing in Khaw’s novel was an outlier. Maybe I read it at the wrong time. Maybe I’d like this one more.

Let’s cut to the chase: I did not. The same sticking points on writing style that plagued me in The All-Consuming World were just as prevalent here. Namely, that the purple prose is so strong that you can barely tell what’s supposed to be happening in the scenes. That matters less in a horror novella, perhaps, but it’s still irritating as all hell. How am I meant to follow the story, if I can’t tell what’s even happening?

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. 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. It’s a big haunted house. The characters? None of them really stuck. 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. And I think that sums up my feelings about them. They are these prototypes, and very little else. 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.

Any which way, what I ended up with was the certainty that Cassandra Khaw is not for me. Two books is enough for me to tell that, there’s no point trying much more.

The haunted house motif, whether on the big screen or the page usually has plenty of signifiers that can make a lot of entries largely generic.

Cassandra Khaw takes this to task in Nothing But Blackened Teeth, providing a rich mythology where five young friends seeking a thrill looking at planning a wedding in a supposedly cursed old mansion.

Despite being quite short in length (just over 100 pages) Khaw packs in plenty of mythology and nuisance which will make you wish this was 200 pages longer given the scope of the story.

This is very much a one sitting type of read, as you will be drawn in by the twisted story and when the preverbial s*it hits the fan, you won't want to put it down.

Set in a famous haunted Heian mansion, a group of friends go to attend a couple's wedding, why you ask yourself? The group also have a past history which is rather messed up to say the least! The action starts immediately, and you see the action through one of the group's eyes. The format is very filmic in it's nature, and the writing would easily transfer to a movie, there are plenty of lush descriptions and lots of nods to Japanese culture, history and horror. A great novella which ticks all of the boxes for fans of Japanese horror in particular.