One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones. [loc. 238]
Talia has always wanted to get married in a haunted house: when she announces her marriage to Faiz, their wealthy friend Phillip flies the couple and their friends -- Cat the narrator and Lin her ex -- to Japan, and sets up a sleepover in an abandoned mansion. They have "“booze, food, sleeping bags, a youthful compulsion to do stupid shit... and a hunger for a good ghost story”" [loc. 202]. And they have a setting rich with stories about dancing girls buried in the walls, and a legend of an aborted wedding where the groom died en route.
Cat is an interesting narrator because she's not sane or sober. Talia hates her, because she once dated Faiz; but everyone in the group seems to have dated everyone else. Cat is more sensitive than the others to the ambience of the house, and to the presence there: the ghost whose kiss she feels. And she's the one thinking of ohaguro, teeth blackened with a solution of vinegar and iron filings, like the dead bride.
A novella with a slow start and a crescendo to horrific violence. Is Cat a wholly reliable narrator?
This was a Hallowe'en read which led me down various Wikipedia rabbit-holes: Khaw drops in various Japanese terms without explication, and though one can appreciate the story without understanding every nuance, my need to know distracted me from the story. I loved the prose, though, and the subversion of horror tropes was splendid.
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