Hoping for a haunted house : Linghun by Ai Jiang (Review)

A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for Linghun by Ai Jiang. This is your spoiler warning. Please check the trigger warning before diving into this book.

What would you do if there was a place that had the power to invoke the spectres of your loved ones lost to death? A strange city known for its magical real estate, houses that manifest the ghosts of your past for a price. An abode where you could coexist with your family, even after their death. The story of Linghun is set in HOME, a place exactly like that. 

In the novella Linghun, HOME or Homecoming of Missing Entities is a neighbourhood known for invoking paranormal entities, a way to seek closure after an unexpected death. And also a capitalistic endeavour that preys on the grieving. We follow Wenqi and her parents as they move into the neighbourhood in the hope of calling onto the spirit of Tianqi, the eldest child of the family who was killed in a street accident. It’s their last shot at seeking his spirit at the behest of Wenqi’s mother. 

Much to the mother’s delight, her firstborn reappears as a spirit in the house for a few hours every day. He joins the family for dinners and conversations before disappearing every morning. It’s a heart-wrenching plot because as palpable the mother’s grief is- it’s sadder that Wenqi, the younger child who is left behind, is neglected and forced to participate against her wishes. Wenqi is an afterthought. It frustrated me that her mother picks her dead son’s spirit over her living child over and over again while actively refusing to move on in a healthy way. 

There are two secondary plot lines in the story. One that follows an old woman from a small village in Fuzhou who lost her husband a decade ago and has sequestered herself inside a house, carrying around her husband’s ashes and begging him to haunt the house. The other plot line follows Liam and his parents who linger around the lawns with other people who couldn’t afford the expensive haunted houses, waiting for their turn to buy a house while having abandoned their entire lives and careers.

The story is wrought with grief, each character portraying a different shade and stage of it. The author does a great job at creating a multi-layered plot featuring people from different facets of life- from an old woman who has lived her whole life to please her husband and lost every aspect of her own identity to a young boy who has been neglected by his parents in favour of the unborn child that they lost. I found the messaging to be quite heavy-handed at times with a little bit more telling than showing. But the author does a good job at exploring the grief of death, of not belonging as an immigrant and that of losing yourself to a marriage for the sake of one’s family.

While this story wasn’t my favourite and caused me quite a bit of frustration, as the winner of a Nebula Award, the book is obviously well received by everyone else. I hope my opinion doesn’t deter you from picking up this horror novella.

A/N: I feel bad that I didn’t like this book as much as I had hoped to considering that it is a horror novella which talks about grief and ghosts, tropes that genuinely intrigue me. I’m also a little disappointed that I’m ending this series on a low note because I quite enjoyed the other novellas that I picked up for this series.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t read all the books sequentially by year and skipped out on a few- it’s because I genuinely was not interested in the 2019 winner and I wasn’t keen on forcing myself to read it and fall into a slump. I’ve also already read the 2017 winner and quite liked it and didn’t feel inclined to reread it for this series. I do recommend Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire, it was a fascinating little fantasy about the aftermath of children encountering portals into other worlds.

If you’ve taken time out to read my posts for the Nebula Novella series, I’m really grateful to you for having patience with me when I disappeared. And if you were someone who was hoping for a spoiler free, condensed recommendation list for the novellas, please stick around for my next post!

Thank you for reading the final installment in my ‘Nebula Novella’ series where I read and reviewed novellas which have won the Nebula Award in the past few years. 

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

Much love, M.