James Nicoll Reviews

Ai Jiang’s 2023 Linghun is a stand-alone coming-of-age/ghost-story novella.

Wenqi is a prudent sort of person, one who would avoid a haunted house. Wenqi’s parents have very different views on the matter. Thus, their current residence: Homecoming Of Missing Entities. HOME for short.

For reasons as yet poorly understood, the Toronto-adjacent HOME subdivision features an abundance of ghosts. Folklore might insist that the shades of the dead are usually tied to some location important to them, that to seek out ghosts one must visit where they died, or at least where they are interred. HOME offers a loophole: move to HOME and a loved one’s remnant might very well manifest.

Wenqi’s parents are obsessed with Wenqi’s late brother. Having an opportunity to buy a domicile in HOME and the funds to do so, they did. High-schooler Wenqi had no choice but to accompany her parents.

As Wenqi soon learns things could be far worse. Consider her schoolmate Liam’s situation. For every person who had the luck and the funds to buy a house, there are several not favored by circumstance. Many simply camp out on the lawns of HOME houses. These desperate legions will happily murder each other for a chance to bid on a HOME dwelling. Liam’s parents are willing members of the army of hopeful homeless persons. Liam is a participant as unwilling as Wenqi.

For the homeless, people like Wenqi and her family are potential dupes, to be somehow prised out of their homes so that a lucky homeless family can move in. Logically, Liam and Wenqi should be antagonists. If they can somehow ally, however, the pair might win something more precious than a house in HOME: escape from the haunted subdivision and its legions of death-obsessed living residents.

~oOo~

This book needs an awful parenting tag. At least Wenqi is merely neglected. The sort of adults who make their way to HOME are fixated on the past and will cheerfully sacrifice the wellbeing of the living, children included, to get a glimpse of their lost pasts. It’s just as well that the parents settle for criminal negligence and not actual human sacrifice, because I am sure some of them would absolutely carve out their living kids’ hearts.

Linghun was published by Dark Matter Ink. I mention this because many people seem to be aware of only one novella publisher, Tor Dot Com. While Tor Dot Com is a fine publisher, and the contributors to the associated website ReacTor are very good writers, ReacTor is not the only novella publisher out there. If readers focus on a single publisher, they will miss many fine works… such as this one.

If my online sources do not fail me, Ai Jiang was first published in 2021. In the three years since, Jiang has won an Ignyte, a Bram Stoker Award and a Nebula, and has been a finalist for the Aurora, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Astounding awards. Authors looking for an excuse to be depressed might well compare their sparsely populated award case with Jiang’s overflowing mantlepiece.

While the Dark Matter Ink book includes several other short stories, this review focuses on the award-winning title novella.

Kudos to the author for providing a plausible reason for someone to deliberately move into a haunted house that is not either ​“realtor.ca’s listing was woefully incomplete” or even ​“we are vainglorious psychic researchers who have never read Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Liang also gets full points for the manner in which HOME’s primary sales rep maximizes profit potential¹. Who needs scary ghosts when one has grasping realtors?

Cool worldbuilding can be for naught if the characters and story are not interesting. Jiang does not disappoint; Liam and Wenqi earn the reader’s sympathy and attention; Jiang’s prose is engaging.

Readers enticed by this review will want to look out for this story AND for the author’s many other award-winning works.

Linghun is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). I did not find Linghun at Apple Books.

1: I assume that word count limits prevented the author from inserting sly digs against nefarious provincial premiers.