The Novella Files: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Subject: Cassandra Khaw. Nothing But Blackened Teeth [Nightfire, 2021]

Accolades: N/A

Genre: Horror

Executive Summary:  A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.

It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

And she gets lonely down there in the dirt. (From Goodreads)

Assessment: Ennui is characterized by listlessness yet is never made more animated and compelling than in Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Sometimes ennui can be seemingly mundane--a lack of satisfying direction in your life. Other times, it can be a bride buried alive under her wedding venue, waiting for her runaway groom to arrive. While huge contrasts in severity, those who've experienced the former know that it can still be quite horrifying, and this novella is able to drudge up human nature and make it just as unnerving as the spiritual evil it unearths. That's not the only contrast between realism and fantasy. Nothing But Blackened Teeth has an array of realistically flawed characters, infused with Japanese folklore and sweeping, metaphorical language to elevate its tone into something uniquely satisfying.

Cassandra Khaw knows how to make every object seem interesting with inventive descriptions, but their dialogue is just as cutting. Whether its protagonist Cat's half-remove from the horrific proceedings in which things are still bubbling within her but she tries to stifle, or her friend Faiz' jovial attitude that begins to unmask, the characterization is always compelling and authentic. One thing that should be mentioned is that Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a story that leans more heavily into characterization than horror - especially in its first half - but to me, it's that grounding in humanity that make the latter proceedings cut deeper.

Khaw's writing has always worked for me, but I think this is my favorite of their works. The prose is just as lyrical and original as their best, and it's married to themes and characters that develop a lot of growth and complexity. It moves at a steady pace and growing tension, rewarding its readers with something incredibly moving and illuminating. Nothing But Blackened Teeth will make its readers think they've been plummeted into the action with lasting effects that should temper their ennui for quite a while.

Score: 8/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

Stranger than Fiction: Tokyo Vice, by Jake Adelstein

If this is really what (being a reporter in) Japan is like, I’d rather be cleaning (or living in) a toilet!

Adelstein, Jake. Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. Vintage Crime: 2010.

People bandy around the phrase ‘stranger than fiction’ a lot (NB: I have no idea if this claim is statistically accurate), but it’s not often that something written and presented as an entirely true story can actually succeed in shocking its readers with its seeming fictionality. Why is that? Because non-fiction writing, like all writing, operates according to narrative conventions, and generally, the things we know belong to the category of non-fiction don’t resemble, in a narrative sense, the things we know are firmly in the category of fiction. Lo and behold, most of the “non-fiction” books that do jolt us with their ‘stranger than fiction’ vibe manage the feat by borrowing liberally from the conventions of whatever genre of fiction writing their true story most closely resembles.

So if someone wishes to write the true story of a mystery or whodunit, consciously or unconsciously (but probably consciously—see below) the would-be author might drift over into the narrative world of mystery (fiction) writing. If done poorly, this raises all sorts of red flags for the reader, because the same markers of fictionality in a straightforward mystery novel are popping up in a supposedly non-fiction story, and that strikes many readers as problematic. If done well, I suppose this narrative drift might simply make the story more of a page-turner. Either way, it’s certainly no surprise authors are tempted to mix literary genres (non-fiction plus a fiction genre or genres), because unless they are in academia, authors want, naturally enough, to sell books, and presumably a non-fiction story that reads like a mystery novel will jump off the shelves a lot faster than a painstakingly factual, dry non-fiction story.

Suppose you had experienced more than most people’s share of interactions with a crime syndicate, and wanted to report those experiences…in the most riveting way possible. Would you:

A)   Limit yourself to a regurgitation of your own notes, in chronological order, of what happened and when, and strive for an objective tone in reporting the events, or

B)    Jazz it up a little, using “caper (fiction) story” narrative tricks to make what happened sound more exciting?

If you chose option (A), congratulations! You’re a career academic, and your books will sell literally dozens of copies. If, however, you chose (B), then you and Jake Adelstein have something in common.

Everything about Tokyo Vice, from its cover and title down to the witty, entertaining first-person narration, feels like a novel. In fact, it’s so novelistic that if someone later comes forward to confess that “Jake Adelstein” was just a literary character s/he invented, and the entire tale was made up, I don’t think I’d be particularly surprised (though I have no reason to believe this or something like it is actually the case, especially since Adelstein managed to publish his work in places like the Washington Post, an impressive feat if imaginary!). In a way, this is a compliment to Adelstein’s writing style, because it really was a page-turner, an in-depth glimpse into the murky world of organized crime—and (at least to me) the even more interesting phenomenon of the inner workings of the police-media love/hate-fest—in Japan over the last two decades.

What about it screams “novel”, then? 1) Bribery, corruption, international conspiracies, the FBI making deals with the Japanese mob in exchange for information, a sort of international black-market organ trade of sorts, at least one dirty cop, a serial killer (possibly more than one depending on whether mob hitmen count!), “hits” on those who get in the yakuza’s way, several physical confrontations from which the intrepid protagonist managed to extricate himself only by violently subduing his attacker, and—it is strongly implied—the revenge killing of one of the protagonist’s closest friends and allies.

All of these elements, however, could have been recounted very dryly and impersonally, but for better or worse (on balance, I think “better”) Adelstein chose a far more engaging approach. First of all, the book isn’t consistently in chronological order, though it certainly moves roughly “in order”, from his early career in Japan up to the end of his Japan-based reportage. Adelstein deserves praise for turning what might have seemed largely rather monotonous work, of relentlessly befriending cops in order to wheedle them into awarding an exclusive to one’s own paper, into a riveting account full of sex, sleaze, drugs, human trafficking, money laundering, and murder. But the question is: did he go too far in sensationalizing the material? If even half of what he’s claiming in his book is indeed true, then the material is plenty sensational all by itself; this reader, at least, wonders whether, say, Adelstein humble-bragging about his “poor” martial arts skills that, nevertheless, proved sufficient to incapacitate a yakuza enforcer/bouncer, etc., really adds substantively to the story he’s telling.

I guess what I’m saying is that the Ivory Tower in me longs for a thicker veneer of objectivity, of dispassionate reporting of “just the facts”, whereas the avid reader in me crows at the deeply personal nature of the tale. Be that as it may, this is a book worth reading, especially for anyone out there who clings to the belief that Japan is utterly safe and pristine. Adelstein’s harrowing account of Kabukicho and its apparently then- (and, perhaps, still today?) rampant human trafficking of non-Japanese women, left me queasy, while the ‘antagonist’ of the book, Tadamasa Goto, would make anyone’s blood boil given the underhanded way he arranged his liver transplant—at UCLA, no less. This much seems clear: Adelstein would probably have a relatively easy time transitioning into writing fictional first-person caper or mystery stories!

Strangeness factor: 7 (on a scale from 1, A.R. Burn’s snooze-worthy History of Greece, to 10, the life story of Roy Sullivan, a guy who shot himself in the head…after being struck by lightning a ridiculous seven times over the course of his life)

This intervention between true stories and fiction was brought to you by Zhaoyun, who loves all tales, whether they’re as genuine and trustworthy as a degree from Trump University or just seem like they’re imaginary, and reviewer on Nerds of a Feather since 2013.  

Microreview [book]: Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Its greatest fault: being too short to develop its tantalizing ideas/relationships further!

Nagamatsu, Sequoia. Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. Black Lawrence Press, 2016.

Buy it here.

As my dozens of fans worldwide are no doubt aware, I’m generally not a fan of short story anthologies. That’s because there are only two types of short stories: (1) short stories so good the reader laments their shortness, wishing for a longer treatment, and (2) bad short stories. Ultimately, why read either one? Needless to say, I went into this assignment (and, you know, all other assignments) with a snarky, judgmental attitude.

The one glimmer of promise for this volume is that it’s a self-anthology, i.e. all short stories by the same author whose order, presumably, was also carefully considered by same, so it’s not as though it’s a typical third-person ‘throw it all in—the readers will never know the difference’ anthology hack-job.

The opening story in the volume took some time for me to get used to, but once I did, it fell neatly into category (1) above. (Not to ruin the suspense of this page-turner of a review, but I’m happy to report that actually all the stories were category (1)’s!) My reason for liking this story, about a family torn apart (in one person’s case literally!) by ‘kaiju’ (mega-monsters like Godzilla, etc.), was not so much the Japanese pop culture subject matter, though I’ll be the first to admit I like that stuff, but because of the central mystery: how, in just a few pages, did Nagamatsu manage to make me care about the characters involved? It’s written in a whimsical, nonlinear manner, from multiple perspectives, and although one of the central characters in this family drama had, it turns out, died years earlier, somehow I felt myself choked up imagining the trauma of this loss on the surviving family members. If you’d told me beforehand that I’d be crying at the end of a few-thousand-word story, I’d have chortled (a word that doesn’t get used nearly enough) right in your face, but sure enough, that’s what happened.

And it kept happening, for almost the entire collection! I began to perceive certain patterns to the stories, or perhaps to Nagamatsu’s own preoccupations: nearly all the stories (except, e.g., the one about the neck-extending yōkai and the one about the Kappa) feature a three-person family from which one person has been (usually violently) ripped away, and the stories, their supernatural content notwithstanding, are really all about bereaved family members making sense of their trauma. So even if you’re not really into the notion of, say, ghost visitations by a dead son inspiring his father to make a special fireworks display, I think you’ll find the way the father and the mother separately deal with their loss quite touching.

But that doesn’t absolve Nagamatsu of responsibility for writing category (1) short stories: almost any of these stories, in my novel-tinged opinion, would be better as novellas or novels, because that would afford Nagamatsu greater space to develop these triangular relationships more fully. So we’re back where we started, in the frustrating limbo of short story-land…let’s hope Nagamatsu will escape next time into the fully-fledged playground of the novel, because I can say with certainty that his ideas are great, and deserve longer treatment!

The Math

Objective assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: 

+1 for introducing a (hopefully!) wide audience to many of the coolest Japanese folk tales and supernatural legends, i.e. Kappa, rokurokubi, and more;

+1 for somehow making me care, in only a few short pages, about characters literally just brought to life on the page a few moments before!

+1 for the dendrophilic name!

Penalties: -1 for letting all these good ideas wither on the stupid vine of short storydom

-1 for the impossible-to-abbreviate title (a.k.a., WWGWAWWIG)

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “It’s a bit of all right” in Australian, “kinda awesome” in American, and probably something silly like “capital” or “gobsmackingly good” in ‘English’ 

[For those unfamiliar with our draconian scoring method, see here.]

This little fireside chat (with the caveat that I’m not currently anywhere near a fire, and am not, in fact, chatting with anyone either) was brought to you by Zhaoyun, purveyor of exquisite long-form fantasy & science fiction and yes, even (ugh) short stories since forever, and reviewer at NOAF since 2013.

Extra-special bonus: +1 to Zhaoyun for using ‘chortled’

Summer Reading List 2016: Zhaoyun

Zhaoyun’s Totally Reasonable Summer Reading List, 2016 Edition

Summer is here, and that means fond memories of long-ago encounters with great (okay, probably not that great, but they seemed so at the time) books pilfered (or, you know, just loaned, mostly) from the library in the twilight before racing (more of a tortoise than a hare, to be honest) back home on my bike: the perfect end to perfect summer days! And aside from the library part, which is now out of biking range (i.e., I’m too lazy to go to libraries or bookstores or, in fact, anywhere, nowadays) I still feel there are few pleasures greater than a well-crafted, intriguing fantasy or science fiction novel to be sipped or gulped down in “those summer nights”, as John Travolta would warble. Will I get through all of these? No idea (some idea, actually: probably not), but I relish the challenge! (And that’s another thing I love: relish! Mustard/ketchup...ugh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!)

        

1. Pines, by Blake Crouch    

Yeah, the Matt Dillon one, but with words and pages and stuff, not Netflixery. Actually, I’ve already finished this book, and found it interesting if a bit uneven (or to put it in a more flattering light, it had a surprising structure); overall, I liked it enough to be annoyed by the subtle yet enormous changes from book to screen. I also liked it enough to add…

2. Wayward, by Blake Crouch

           

The just bearable hopelessness of the first book was intriguing enough to pique my curiosity: how will things develop in the horrid little town? How will the Burkes adjust to their idyllic prison? Is there any real future for the entire enterprise? I want to see how Crouch tunnels his way out of the dark-as-can-be pit of despair he left Wayward Pines in at the end of book one. Come to think of it, maybe he should change his name to “Bleak”…

3. The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin

Because how could I not read it? I loved the first book in this new series (and, indeed, everything by Jemisin), and have high hopes for the second. I won’t be reviewing it at NOAF, because I’m not alone in my admiration for Jemisin, but that won’t stop me from reading it—in fact, nothing could possibly stop me!

4. Summerlong, by Peter Beagle

I’m trying to become shallower, more impulsive, and capable of baseless snap-judgments, so I base most book decisions these days on—you guessed it—the covers! Summerlong’s is delightful, and has raised my expectations quite high. But aren’t I just setting myself up for disappointment, you say? Maybe…but it’s the world’s fault for making such a pretty cover J

5. Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Intriguing title, and plus it’s based upon Japanese folk tales and legends, of which I am something of a connoisseur (or at least I aspire to be). On the potential minus-side is the fact that this is a collection of short stories (and unlike idiots like Edgar Allen Poe, I utterly reject the idea that a story should be short enough to enjoy in a single sitting—quite the opposite, in fact), but some of them are apparently about kaiju, and everybody loves kaiju! This is the perfect segue into…

6. The Kaiju series, by Jeremy Robinson

They say you shouldn’t read books by people you know (actually, I have no idea if ‘they’ say that, but I just felt instinctually like it was a bad idea), so for a long time I resisted the urge to read anything by this guy, who I knew as an older acquaintance/family friend long ago, in the halcyon days of my childhood. Then I tried reading something by him, and didn’t really like it, but it was the first book he’d written, and it didn’t seem really fair to judge him by his earliest effort (though that didn’t/doesn’t stop me from roundly condemning Patricia Cornwell and the cringe-worthy Postmortem—maybe the Kay Skarpetta series got better after that, but I certainly hope it didn’t manage to get any worse!). So I thought I’d give Jeremy another try, and somewhat randomly selected this Kaiju series. I’m a bit of the way into the series now, and am not at all disappointed—he’s really upped his game, as even if the story is somewhat familiar/well-trodden ground, the quality of the writing is top-notch, especially the “as ___ as ______” descriptive one-liners! Best of all (though not for the unfortunate characters caught by the monster thereabouts), much of the action takes place near, and a few scenes almost within sight of, my childhood home!

This list brought to you by Zhaoyun, ruthless devourer of fantasy and sci-fi novels and films since primordial times, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

Best Cinematic Comic Adaptation Tournament (Final Four)

By virtue of what I will assume was a generational divide, Jack Nicholson's Joker dropped Heath Ledger's Joker into a vat of Smilex to make it into the Final Four, and NoaF staff-favorite Dredd got a faceful of ugly from Hellboy and has gone to the great ink and pencil cubicle in the sky. No surprise that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still riding high, nor that the atomic-powered Akira has made it to the big stadium.

Click to expand

In the tournament to establish the Best Comic Book Movie Ever, I give you your Final Four.

Previous rounds here, here, here, and here.

Best Cinematic Comic Adaptation Tournament (Round 3)

And then there were eight. Or, seven really, since there are two Batmen (Batmans?) at this table.

I have to admit personally I'm very happy Hellboy has made it this far and fist-smashed Kick-Ass into the pavement. And handily. But we had some nailbiters, just like the last round. Nausicaa only just squeaked Ghost in the Shell, and Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy apparently had a dance-off, which left Iron Man et al. going for shawarma and Star Lord et al. advancing to the next round. With the exception of the Indie/Imprint Region, everything else has gone all-chalk so far.

Click to Expand

Next stop, the Final Four. We know Batman's going to be giving a Japanese cartoon character the stare-down, but the other half of the bracket is murkier. Will NoaF favorite Dredd overcome poor viewership and overcome a hellspawn only to get a faceful of vibranium? Time -- and your votes -- will tell.

Previous rounds here, here, and here.

Marvel Region

Batman (DC) Region

Indie/Imprint Region

International Region

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Johnny Mnemonic

Dossier – Longo, Robert. Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

Filetype – film (of sorts).

File under – cyberpunk derivative (but also proto-cyberpunk, as it was based on the eponymous 1981 short story by Cyberpunk doyen William Gibson, predating even Neuromancer).

Summary – An utterly unappealing drone stuffs info into his head and then spends the rest of the movie trying to get it out, enlisting the aid of everyone from a bright-eyed street samurai to a bunch of squatters to a smarty-pants dolphin in his quest to not die. Arrayed against him are the Yakuza and their unstoppable secret weapon, Dolph Lundgren. (It all sounded ridiculous back in 1995, and it still does today.)

High-tech – cool ideas like 'wetware' brain datajacks and storage capacity (of a mind-blowing 160 GB, slightly bigger than my crappy smart phone's!) and monofilament whips and virtual reality gloves and visors and so forth are present, but depicted in what passed for mediocre special effects in the mid-90s, making it all feel (and look) like a goofy Shadowrun session gone wrong.

  

Low-life – Director Robert Longo (whose film career didn't exactly blossom after this little gem) does deserve points for the mise en scene (consistent with his 'real' job as a sculptor and painter), as the film was shot mostly at night, and is filled with establishing shots which nicely illustrate just how crappy everyone's life is who is stuck near the garbage heaps of cities like Newark (an analysis which is perhaps true in the real world of 2015!) compared to suit-clad bourgeois stooge Johnny. But the Lo-Teks, a bunch of idiot luddites with a ton of crappy weapons and a combination magic dolphin/microwave emitter, failed to win me over; I was rooting for the Yakuza throughout, since at least they had style.

Dark times – It's standard dystopian fare—mega-corps rule the world, and unless you work for one of them (in which case you're a mega-villain by definition), chances are you're a grimy "Lo-Tek" resistance fighter/casualty living in a literal dump, which is what the world apparently turns into if corporations are allowed to seek profits (anti-capitalist ravings that no one took seriously in 1995, or doubtless more than twelve people would have gone to see it). The film adds the wrinkle of a disease, the Black Shakes, which is brought on by exposure to the now-ubiquitous electronics of the world, but that's silly and in any case everything is reduced to the simplest and most Manichean moral terms imaginable: either a character is a Good Guy (one of the Lo-Teks, or Johnny himself, or 'Jane', etc.) or irremediably Evil (bright-eyed monofilament whip wielding Yakuza assassin, Dolph Lundgren's bizarre Preacher guy, Ralfi). The only character to show any moral complexity is the Yakuza/Pharmakom exec played by, that's right, comedian and gritty crime film director Kitano Takeshi, though his change of heart is stupid and merely involves transforming from Evil into Good.

Legacy – Johnny was without a doubt one of the most high-profile (and high-budget) film adaptations of a cyberpunk story in the 1990s. On the other hand, given its mediocre subject matter and less than mediocre execution, it got exactly the critical and box office reception that it deserved. 

In retrospect – One feels slimy echoes of Michael Crichton's histrionic Rising Sun here. Johnny was made in the mid-nineties, when social anxiety about the impending 'takeover' of the U.S. by Japan wasn't yet recognized to be totally ridiculous. It was a time when people could apparently imagine a dystopian future where soulless Japanese pharmaceutical executives would join forces with heartless Yakuza to crush the world in their iron grip. In fact, I thought that aspect of the story was pretty silly way back when I first saw the film, twenty years (!) ago, and it hasn't aged well.

           

Johnny also suffers from anti-technological fears of ubiquitous electronics that strike the viewer in 2015 as breathtakingly naive. Is there a crippling neurological disorder just around the corner, caused by all our electronic stuff? If so...how come radio waves (i.e., TV, etc.) and all other forms of 'harmful' electronic radiation have consistently (even back in 1995, in fact!) been shown to be utterly without negative effect? You want to know which modern invention is one of the most harmful to human health? The x-ray—which was invented like a gazillion years ago. But even the x-ray isn't so bad, or at least that's what I tell myself when the dentist smilingly zaps me for another one of those stupid panoramic images that nobody uses for anything, bathing my entire skull in short-wave radiation...

I guess what I'm saying is that the most dystopian parts of Johnny are also the weakest parts of the story. The Japanese have not conquered the world (or, if they have, they did a lot better job hiding that fact than the Yakuza thugs do in the movie!), and no terrifying Black Shakes has arisen to doom the most technocratic of us. Incidentally, I've heard the main plot of the film, which concerns said Black Shakes and a certain megacorp too selfish to release its cure, was the most infuriating change from story to film, and alienated many Gibson fans from Johnny. Having never read the story, I didn't need any such fancy justification—Keanu Reeves (it was pretty much his epic "I want ROOM SERVICE!" rant that nailed the coffin shut on Johnny for me) did it for me free of charge. Except for the price of the movie ticket, now that I think about it—curses! You may have won that round back in 1995, Reeves, but the film also delivered your career a nearly lethal blow; I'd call it even.

So there you have it, folks. Johnny failed to win over audiences back in 1995, when its vision of the faraway year of 2021 probably sounded marginally less absurd; it doesn't have a prayer of winning anyone over now! Not all of its problems stem from harmful changes to the original story in the process of film adaptation, however; some of the most ludicrous ideas are right there in Gibson's original vision of the future, like heroin-addicted uber-dolphins. Actually, the film made a small improvement—it eliminated the dolphin's chemical dependency sub-plot, judging it (correctly) to be stupid and irrelevant. No, Gibson: in the future, drug problems won't be so severe they've begun extending to other species, and dolphins can't microwave Dolph Lundgren!

Analytics

For its time: 2/5.
Viewed today: 1/5.
Cybercoefficient: 3/10.

Zhaoyun, no prophet of the future, can nonetheless spot ridiculous predictions and Manichean ethics when they crop up, and since 2013 has been taking great pleasure here at Nerds of a Feather in eviscerating books and films that spew forth such drivel.

Microreview [book]: The Burning Dark, by Adam Christopher

Great Fun Slightly Marred by TMDI

Christopher, Adam. The Burning Dark. Tor Books (paperback/Kindle): March 2015.

Buy it here starting March 3rd. 

If you're wondering what the "D" stands for above, it's 'Dramatic', as in "Too Much Dramatic Irony", the irksome phenomenon in which we readers instantly know or can easily guess a key plot point but characters struggle on, oblivious to what's right under their collective noses. There's been an epidemic of TMDI in US/UK fiction (books and movies) recently, my favorite example of which is the inevitable stupidity of characters in zombie movies when confronted by the eponymous baddies. Zombies are, one would think, pretty self-explanatory, even at first glance, and yet all too often, sloppy directors and authors try to get us reader/viewers to swallow the ultimate whopper: that most of us, if confronted by zombies face to face, would take absurd risks and wind up getting killed, all out of an obstinate refusal to accept the idea that zombies could exist. 

The DI component is particularly problematic in stories that are, to the reader/viewer, obviously about zombies, since from the very beginning we know zombies are going to appear, and are forced to dread the first 50% or so of the tale, since it's simply going to chronicle the extremely prolonged reluctance of the surviving main characters to accept what, to us, is the fundamental premise of the story! So here's a nickel's worth of free advice for all you would-be zombie storytellers out there: ditch the stupid "this can't be happening!" and "a strange noise? Think I'll go check it out, alone, in the dark, while drunk!" nonsense. How about, instead, we get a few stories showing what people would actually do, if confronted by slavering green-tinged maniacs: instant understanding, followed swiftly by the trusty 'two to the head, make sure they're dead' approach.

"It's so nice to just sit here and share some human companionship!"

This seems as good a time as any to admit that The Burning Dark does not, in fact, have zombies (though it sort of does, now that I think about it). But this otherwise excellent novel does suffer from a bit TMDI, which was particularly acute in my case given my background in Japanese cultural history. You see, the story is purportedly a mystery about, to paraphrase the children's song, "Which of these (characters) is not like the others?" That's because one of the characters is not human at all, but an ancient and vengeful goddess trapped in the underworld and hell-bent (see what I did there?) on revenge against all living things. But there's little real mystery involved. Imagine this Villainess introduced herself as, oh, I don't know, "Orpheus's Wife" yet all the characters failed to make the connection to the 'trying to return from the underworld but betrayed by her husband' idea. We get the Japanese cultural equivalent of "Orpheus's Wife", Izanami, so readers well versed in Things Japanese will know from page one the "secret" identity of the Villainess.

"Aha!" You might say, pouncing on my argument, "most readers won't know that, which means this isn't DI at all!" Not so—Izanami's otherworldliness is made explicit right from the beginning, with glaringly obvious hints dropped to both reader and characters (as well as not even the flimsiest attempt to cast suspicion on any of the other characters as potentially being 'the one not like the others'), but none of the characters figure it out until *right* at the end. If that's not DI, I don't know what is! "Unfair!" I hear you cry, "the story explains why the other characters have trouble realizing that Izanami isn't who or what she claims to be," but that's actually irrelevant, since I'm objecting not to the explanation of the characters' idiocy within the story, but the type of story itself: a story fueled (or in my opinion, polluted) by dramatic irony.

Does it ruin the entire novel, an intricately crafted horror/suspense/sci fi page-turner? Not at all. I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes one or more of the following: a) novels about the unfathomable alienness of, well, alien life forms; b) well-crafted, interesting characters who face Interesting Situations; and/or c) good times. But those hypersensitive to (TM)DI, you have been warned. Take solace in the fact that there's plenty to enjoy, though, especially the intrepid Captain Ida Cleveland, and the fact that there is no (concerted) attempt to pair off the characters in happily ever after-style romantic couples. Not every great sci fi story need rely, after all, on the sort of emotional release the firm promise of heterosexual romantic love provides the audience; Terminator 2 is certainly the finest of the Terminator movies and (not coincidentally!) is the only one of the series to have so deftly avoided any sexual subplot.

Meandering back to the topic of The Burning Dark, it's two thumbs up, minus half a thumb for TMDI!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a mostly mesmerizing story, +1 for fine characters like Captain Ida

Penalties: -2 for an unmysterious streak of (TM)DI

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

[Before you cry havoc and let slip the words of war, let me hit you with some knowledge: here at NOAF, our reviews are on a bell curve, meaning there are very few 9s/10s--or 1s/2s. In our system, a 7/10 is excellent!]

Zhaoyun, whom you have by now discovered is no fan of dramatic irony, quite likes sf/f/zompire stories that push beyond the inane limitations imposed by convention, and has been singing the praises of such stories here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.