The Shadow Book of Ji Yun: The Chinese Classic of Weird True Tales, Horror Stories, and Occult Knowledge

"A new and wholly fresh mother lode of 'true weird tales,' ... the only real comparisons to Shadow Book's treasure trove of bizarre stories, full of humour, horror, suspense, magic and mystery, are Japan's Kwaidan, the Thousand and One Nights, and most certainly Pu Sung-ling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio." ―Fortean Times

"Written more than two centuries ago, Ji Yun's 'true weird stories' prove that humanity's greatest fears are timeless." ―Rue Morgue

Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft were Chinese and his tales were true. Or if a national, political figure like Benjamin Franklin was also a paranormal investigator—one who wrote up his investigations with a chilling, story-telling flair that reads like a combination of Italo Calvino, Lafcadio Hearn, Franz Kafka, and Zhuangzi. In China, at roughly the same time that Franklin was filling the sky with electrified kites, a figure existed who was a little bit of both these things. He was Special Advisor to the emperor of China, Head of the Department of War, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most celebrated scholars and poets of his time. His name was Ji Yun.

Beginning in 1789, Ji Yun published five volumes of weird tales that combined supernatural and frequently moving autobiographical accounts with early speculative fictions. By turns darkly comic, terrifying, and transcendentally mystical, they revolutionized Chinese speculative fiction and nonfiction, and portrayed a China never before depicted: one poised between old ways and new, where repeating rifles shared the world with Tibetan black-magic, Jesuit astronomers rubbed elbows with cosmic horrors, and a vibrant sex trade of the reanimated dead was conducted in the night.

Combining insights into Chinese magic and metaphysics with tales of cannibal villages, sentient fogs, alien encounters, and fox spirits, alongside nightmarish narratives of soul swapping, haunted cities, and the "jiangshi" (the Chinese vampire), there is no literary work quite like that of Ji Yun. Designed by him to be both entertainment and an occult technology that awakens readers to new dimensions of reality, one cannot walk away from these stories unchanged. The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a literary translation of Ji Yun's most masterful tales.