She Is A Haunting

I would like to begin by apologising; I haven’t made a post in a few weeks. I got a full time job, and figuring out how to balance this blog, my writing, and life in general with work isn’t easy for me, though I do hope to get better at this in the next few weeks. Thankfully, today I have a day off, so I will be writing a couple of posts and scheduling them to automatically go live. Now that I’ve explained, let’s get into the review.

*****

This house eats and is eaten.

This summer, Jade Nguyen has one goal: to survive living a lie with her sister and their estranged dad while he fixes up a decaying colonial house in Vietnam. If she can be straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, then college and freedom will be hers.

But the house has other plans. Dead bugs line its windowsills and its gardens grow monstrous blooms. Then the ghost of a beautiful bride gives Jade a cryptic warning: DON’T EAT.

With the help of rebellious local girl Florence, Jade is determined to prove the house is haunted, and that it won’t rest until it consumed her family completely.

*****

I found this book completely by accident. I was shopping in Gay’s the Word in London (one of my favourite places) and I picked it up. I’ve struggled to find good sapphic horror in the past (especially that isn’t ‘dark romance’ or ‘spicy’), so I was so excited when I read the back of the book. I tore through it on the bus to work in about three days. I would like to apologise (again) for the lack of diacritical marks above the names of the Vietnamese places; I have no idea how to add them on this website. The names will be written with an asterisk after them so you know that this isn’t how they’d normally be written.

‘She Is A Haunting’ follows seventeen year old Jade as she travels to Vietnam for the first time. Both of her parents were born there, but she herself had never been before. She first travels to Saigon with her mother, sister and brother, and then her sister and her fly to visit their estranged father in Da Lat*, where he is renovating a French colonial hotel that he hopes to turn into a hotel.

The reason for the visit is simple: Jade wants her father’s money to pay for college. She has watched her mother struggle to provide for her family for years, and refuses to let her mother pick up more hours at work to pay the fees. Her father has agreed to finance her first year of college if she visits him – the first time she’ll see him since he left his family years ago. And so, Jade finds herself taking up residence in the house (called Nha Hoa*) alongside her father and her younger sister, Lily.

The house was first built by French colonizers, and it is a grand house. Trang Thanh Tran’s descriptions of the house made it easy for me to imagine what it looked like, and I found myself entranced. At first, Nha Hoa* seems like an idyllic house, steeped in potential and nestled within the forests of Da Lat*, but Jade soon learns that looks can be misleading.

When she first enters her room for the next five weeks, she notices a cacophony of dead bugs littering the windowsill. She is disgusted, but she simply explains this by blaming her father; she still hasn’t forgiven him for leaving, and finds any reason to blame him for… well, everything. From the start, the reader is aware of the strained (or non-existent) family dynamic, but that is not what I’m most excited to speak about it this review.

Things pretty much take a turn for the worse very quickly. While there are strange things happening and strange feelings that Jade has, the first real sign of a haunting comes when Jade wakes up in the middle of the night and bumps into a woman in the kitchen. At first, she thinks her father is simply bringing people home, but she soon realizes that this isn’t the case when the woman turns to her. Jade realizes that she’s dreaming, but then the woman speaks to her. Two words: “Dung an*“. Don’t eat. The woman holds her hands out to Jade, revealing a squirming mass of maggots on her palms, and it only gets worse from here. Jade flees back to her room, hoping against hope that it was nothing more than a dream and knowing, somewhere deep down, that she was wide awake.

From here, the plot moves quickly, with the introduction of more characters including local Vietnamese girl Florence, and Alma and Thomas, a white couple who have essentially funded Ba’s (Jade’s father’s) renovation of Nha Hoa*. I personally liked the introduction of Alma, simply because when she was talking about her dissertation topic (the founding of French Indochina), Jade states that she “has a degree in colonization”. This bit made me laugh maybe more than it should have.

‘She Is A Haunting’ is filled to the brim with gross descriptions (I wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘gore’). For me, it was expertly done. I found myself slightly queasy in parts, which is exactly the kind of reaction I want from my horror books. The most disgusting part that had me muttering to myself came when Jade was dreaming.

The ghost she’d seen in the kitchen (who’s name is Cam, as Jade learned) has been showing her memories from her own life. Cam seems as though she wants to help Jade figure out what’s going on in Nha Hoa*, and she shows Jade the former owner of the house, Frenchwoman Marion Dumont. Marion suffered with agoraphobia when she was alive, and is described as evil, cruel, and insanely racist, calling the Vietnamese characters “little rat”. The reader immediately hates her (as they should), but soon learns that Marion’s agoraphobia doesn’t stop when she’s dead. She remains in the house, incensed that her house has been overrun by the people whose country it was built in.

She appears before Jade in the middle of the night, disguising herself as Cam (who Jade has a strange kind of crush on) before revealing herself. She presses her hand down on Jade’s neck, and Jade realizes that she’s awake. She begins to panic as Marion’s body moves away. The only thing is… Marion’s head doesn’t move. Instead, her neck elongates, taking on the same kind of texture as taffy (the author’s choice of words). While the book is chock full of unsettling descriptions, this is by far my favourite. It is so visceral and easy to imagine that I found myself recoiling, but yet unable to stop reading.

Another part of the book that I really enjoyed comes in the form of small ‘mini-chapters’. Each couple of chapters, there is a small half page of writing, titled with the name of an organ/part of the body. These are: Mouth, kidney, appendix, eye, brain, dermis, liver, larynx, marrow, tendon, tongue, stomach, and heart. These sections kept me reading; I wanted to know what the next body part would be. These sections are written in a completely different way from the rest of the book, and I found it intriguing, although it took me entirely too long to realize that these parts were written from the POV of the house itself.

If I had one issue with this book, it would be that the ‘finale’ seems a little rushed. We spend so much time learning about the history of the house for the finale to last two (short) chapters and then culminate in the characters leaving the house to rot. While I did enjoy the ending, it could have done with a little more.

I know that ‘She Is A Haunting’ only has a 3.41 rating on Goodreads, but for me, this book is awarded 5 stars. The horror elements of the book are very well done, and I found the plot captivating and genuinely well written. I recommend picking up a copy if you also like creepy, gross, sapphic books.

If you have any recommendations for books, please get in touch with me on Instagram (@thetaysmitheffect) or Twitter (@taysmitheffect). I should probably be reading my physical TBR, but I’m always in search of new and exciting books to add to my growing list of 5 star reads. I’m looking for horror, and preferably sapphic books, but this isn’t a necessity.

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