Holy. Shit.

I started this book around 10pm, late and dark enough to enhance the eerieness, and it seemed tame enough — yeah, the narrator is a murdered spirit-girl who goes around murdering people, but she only targets murderers and you can kind of skim the gory details of the descriptions. A few chapters later, though, I remembered why I absolutely cannot watch Asian horror: it’s too psychological. The thing going bump in the night has a long, deep malevolent history and cannot be stopped by mortal means. (I’m no expert on Japanese folklore, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of this book, but I greatly appreciated that the Japanese vocabulary was used sparingly and appropriately, and there does seem to be great respect for the culture and traditions.)

Literally, chills ran down my spine as I read this book — admittedly I’m a coward who had nightmares for months after reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches; honestly this book created more prolonged unease/anxiety than terror, but that’s more than enough for me. Well, maybe except at the reveal of the Big Bad, which felt a little anticlimactic since it was pretty much given away long before Tark and Callie realize her identity, so there’s a reprise when they figure it out that almost made me roll my eyes. But the slowly creeping plot is well built, the conflicts meaningful, the ending made sense without being predictable.