This was my most anticipated 2021 release based on the cover art alone. The contents match the tone it sets, following a group of friends as their stay in a Heian mansion with a dark past goes awry, spiraling into a night of ghost stories, secrets revealed, yokai, and inevitable bloodshed. Khaw's combination of ornate language and cringe-inducing gore was unlike anything I've read recently. I think if this were a full-length novel instead of a novella, it would have been a perfect book. I think that a story so dependent upon festering resentments would have benefited from more space in which to establish them, and more time to draw out the moments of mounting dread.

I definitely thought about the ohaguro-battari in the early hours of this morning, when I had to walk from my bedroom to the bathroom in the dark.