Despite flying across the world to participate in this marriage ceremony, the bonds between them disintegrate as the haunting begins.ĪLSO IN BOOKPAGE: The year's best Halloween reads, ranked from slightly spooky to totally terrifying.

Their friendships, especially as seen through Cat’s eyes, are flimsy at best. Supposed is the key adjective, as each member of the five-person crew has some sort of sordid history with another member-or two. Her barely controlled depressive energy bleeds through every page, punctured by curt dialogue among the small fellowship of supposed friends. These mental soliloquies color the entire story with Cat’s internal angst. Cat thinks this retreat has done her some good, but Khaw does not shy from portraying Cat’s ongoing experience with depression in the form of long, spiraling trains of thought. Cat has recently emerged from six months of self-imposed isolation to treat her depression, the exact details of which are left purposefully vague. Khaw roots the novella in the perspective of Cat, who along with Phillip and the group’s resident pot-stirrer, Lin, is one of the wedding’s three guests.

The couple’s mega-rich friend Phillip secures a venue for them: a Heian-era mansion in a forest, built on the bones of a bride-to-be and other girls killed to appease her loneliness. Nadia, who is engaged to Faiz, has decided she wants to be married in a haunted house. Cassandra Khaw’s horror novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth brings readers to Japan, where a wedding of questionable taste is about to unfold.

Nothing but blackened teeth book