Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

After the death of her mother, Eleanor decides to use her inheritance to buy a house. Set in the Pacific Northwest, the house has been carved out of the wilderness by a visionary architect. While she was alive, Eleanor’s mother was a controlling woman, overseeing almost every aspect of Eleanor’s life. Because of her illness, Eleanor’s mother winnowed down her inheritance, leaving Eleanor with limited options for buying a house. This gets complicated when Eleanor, without guidance from her mother, buys a house “as is” from a less-than-reliable real estate agent. The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, by Kim Fu, is a chronicle of Eleanor’s travails as she deals with all the horrors of first-time home ownership.

Eleanor works as a therapist, but has been primarily communicating with her patients via video chats. Because of the home’s isolated location, the reception is spotty at best. As the novel progresses, she has to deal with everyday fixes and repairs. What, on the surface, would seen routine matters of repair become hellacious confrontations with insurance companies, strange workmen, and the home’s shadowy past. The developer, considered a genius and a visionary, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. When Eleanor inquires about more details, she gets stonewalled by the locals, who find a morbid glee in the developer’s death. Due to her purchasing the home “as is,” she discovers even the smallest repairs aren’t covered under her homeowner’s insurance.

As problems increase, she finds it harder and harder to deal with things. The snowballing repairs get subsumed under a relentless rainstorm. The book excels at teetering between the real and the dreamlike, mixing things up so it is hard to differentiate. Are these bad things actually happening, or is Eleanor stuck in a nightmare? In the novel, the real horrors don’t come when she’s dealing with endless repairs or an awful patient, but, after she re-connects with her ex-boyfriend. The glimmer of reconciliation and the faint promise of a better life shatter when Eleanor reveals to him the circumstances of her mother’s death. The worst wounds are those self-inflicted, uttered in a torrent of obliviousness.

Imagine an episode of Arrested Development directed by David Lynch. Twin Peaks – also, by turns, comedic and horrific – was set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, by Kim Fu, is a haunting tale about a woman cracking under the pressures of everyday life. It also serves as a primer on the horrors of first-time home ownership.