Posted by Tina S. Zhu

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The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, Kim Fu’s latest novel, opens with its protagonist Eleanor Fan engaged in an activity most adults will recognize from experience: looking for a new place to live. Eleanor is looking for a new house, a new place to live, after her mother passed away and left her an inheritance large enough for a down payment. Having been outbid multiple times on houses, she makes an offer on a fixer-upper, a model home in an isolated valley at the base of lush hills. Said valley was being terraformed by an eccentric millionaire developer who has also passed away and left the rest of the development abandoned. On a literal and metaphorical level, this book is right off the bat concerned with what makes a home. What ghosts live in the buildings we live and work in? How do the effects of climate change intersect with grief? Through Eleanor’s struggles, Kim Fu explores these topics of home, sorrow, and the environment.

In Fu’s last work, the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), many of the stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other. Eleanor’s story here is not an exception to this trend in Fu’s work. Her therapy practice is virtual, and she moves into an isolated valley with no neighbors. Her mother has just died, and she is single after a nasty breakup. She is isolated, to put it lightly. Her attempts to make awkward conversation with cashiers are her attempts to try to find in-person human connection, and it is no wonder that she starts thinking of her patients on the other side of the screen as ghosts. There are multiple times she thinks about her old in-person practice and how ineffectual she feels without the ability to see her patients face to face. In our current world, even though the rise of remote work has opened up a great deal of freedom when it comes to where to work, a number of jobs have settled into a hybrid format for this very reason: Eleanor struggles with loneliness from moving to a new, hostile place, the nature of her job, and grief from her mother’s death.

Eleanor and her mother’s relationship is the driving force in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. When her mother was alive, their relationship was best described as codependent. Lele Fan, Eleanor’s mother, raised Eleanor by herself. In college and graduate school, Eleanor struggled with transitioning into adulthood and independence. Lele told her to move back home when she was in graduate school. From then on, Lele took care of all of Eleanor’s household chores and any tasks beyond her school or later work. Lele would go so far as to “peel apples and pears with a knife, slice them inside her palm, and hand-feed segments to Eleanor,” who initially is apprehensive but later appreciates that it “kept her fingers and keyboard clean.” When Lele becomes sick with cancer, Eleanor has to care for her instead, giving her medicine despite her protests. When she was well, Lele handled secretarial duties, acting almost as Eleanor’s personal assistant; after her death, Eleanor has to confront all the life skills she has never developed because her mother handled almost all the mundane tasks of life, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and arranging repairs. I would classify The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts as a coming-of-age story as Eleanor slowly learns to tackle these tasks in her grief. Similarly, Fu’s other two novels, For Today I Am a Boy (2010) and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (2018) both center the transition from childhood to adulthood; it is the speculative trappings of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts that the other two books lack.

The world of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts initially appears identical to our own, but the constant rain and mentions of terraforming to create housing developments reveal that it is a not-so-distant future in which strange weather has become commonplace. For most of the book, it is raining, and characters comment on the constant rain. Eleanor's house floods when it rains and her lock breaks because there is no awning above her door and the nonstop rain damages it. Other characters talk about mudslides destroying nearby low-lying towns, and the valley Eleanor has moved into turns out to contain ghosts. The book leaves unanswered why exactly the previous property developer committed suicide, whether the cause was ghosts or something more mundane, but his death establishes early on that even the richest and most powerful humans are still subject to the whims of Mother Nature. Eleanor is unused to handling flooding houses and home repairs, due to being a renter and the fact that her mother handled most of these logistical issues, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and figuring out the right contractor to handle repairs.

One of Eleanor’s clients at her virtual therapy practice, a man named David, comes to his initial intake session talking about how his wife says the news is making him too negative and liable to start fights. He tells her, “I feel like every day, there’s some new horror. Some new, specific detail, proof of the planet dying even faster than we thought … I feel like the entire country, the entire world, is constantly in the middle of another natural disaster. Every week there’s a once-in-a-century event somewhere.” The only advice Eleanor can offer him is to stay off the news and focus on what he can do to be more present with his wife or actively engage in causes he cares about. Eleanor herself, however, recognizes that this is an inadequate solution as the weather becomes more and more unpredictable. Yet, instead of lingering on existential dread, she is preoccupied with the many repairs her new home needs, as it floods in her new house every time it rains. Eleanor’s world is not one that is kind to the people living there, even as she is busy grieving and dealing with seemingly small concerns in the face of climate change.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts does not contain any specific setting information other than that the valley seems to be somewhere in North America. The reader has no idea where in the world it is set, which is a purposeful omission given how Fu’s previous two novels had highly specific settings—Montreal in For Today I am a Boy and a summer camp in the Pacific Northwest in The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. In contrast, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts could take anywhere in North America and at any time, given that no information on either point is given. Mentions of a pandemic and a lockdown recent enough that characters talk about it initially made me wonder whether it was taking place around our own time, but it is never mentioned whether the lockdown was due to COVID or another disease. This vagueness adds dread to the events that take place in the book, a sense of the unplaceability of time and place that works well with the ghosts that exist out of time in Eleanor’s house.

Even though I found Eleanor and her mother's relationship to be unhealthily codependent when Lele was alive, I found myself rooting for Eleanor in her struggles to try to define herself without her mother. Who are we without other people? This book wants us to ask this question as it shows us Eleanor’s own ghosts, people both living and dead who follow her around when she has nobody else. Kim Fu’s writing at the sentence level is deceptively simplistic. It hides how much her work makes me think.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-valley-of-the-vengeful-ghosts-by-kim-fu/

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