Haunted Neighborhoods: Book reviews of Gwendolyn Kiste's The Haunting of Velkwood and Ai Jiang's Linghun

The haunted house is a staple of horror tales. But in their new books Gwendolyn Kiste and Ai Jiang bring us haunted neighborhoods—Ai Jiang’s work actually involves an entire town—that threaten to entrap and swallow their protagonists whole, keeping them locked in with ghosts of the past. Both books are confrontations with loss and trauma; they’re both about making peace with the dead and letting them go (if you can). They take different forms in these explorations and approach these themes from different angles and with differing outcomes. But they are both gorgeously told works, and haunting.

 

The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste

Twenty years ago, Velkwood Street—a little block of eight houses, in a “blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision”—disappeared from the face of the earth. Or rather, it part-way disappeared: it’s still visible, glowing, half-there and half-not, a kind of suburban Brigadoon behind an invisible, supernatural barrier. Scientists, government agencies, and paranormal investigators have done their best to try to break into what became of Velkwood, to solve its mystery, but all have failed. There are only three survivors from the neighborhood, all best friends, and all away at college when their homes and families vanished. They are also the only ones who can enter what’s now termed the ”Velkwood Vicinity,” and the only ones who might know the true story behind its disappearance.

 

Talitha Velkwood is one of these survivors. Her family was the first to build a house in the subdivision, and so the street was named after them. She’s spent the last twenty years running from that tragedy—running from the journalists and paranormal investigators and tabloid reporters. She’s run from the other survivors, her once-best friends. She’s a ghost in her own life, drifting from town to town and job to job, unable to form any real connections. Until one more paranormal investigator shows up, asking for her help, asking her to go back to Velkwood. But this one offers hope that her little sister, Sophie, is still there. And that Talitha might be able to rescue her.

 

What follows is a sleek, page-turner of a thriller, as Talitha goes back to confront her past and, eventually, reunites with her fellow survivors, Brett and Grace. Talitha succeeds in entering Velkwood on her first try, but her visit only adds to the mystery as she encounters a world where time moves differently, the sky overhead changes color in strange fashion, and her former neighbors and loved ones remain eternally locked in the past. This is an eerie, surreal world of strange and repeating imagery—swarming ants and millipedes, a suddenly darkening sky. And it’s a world that forces her to reckon with her past as she tries to reach out to her sister and relives painful memories of her family and mother.

 

The past is a common theme of ghost stories—ghosts are remnants of the past that won’t move on, after all. Talitha’s reckoning with her past happens in two worlds—the spectral remains of Velkwood and the real world where she reunites with her best friend, Brett. Brett and Talitha were once inseparable but have become estranged. Working through their relationship—understanding what they were to each other, what they are and what they might yet become—is a major thread of this book.

 

Overall, this is a gorgeously told and atmospheric thriller. The plotting is propulsive, and yet for all its sleek tension the prose remains lush. Tension and stakes rapidly rise: Talitha goes back again and again to Velkwood to try to save her sister, but Velkwood is changing Talitha even as her presence changes it. The barrier between worlds becomes porous. She and her survivor friends aren’t just going back to Velkwood--Velkwood is also coming back for them.

 

Kiste’s previous work and novels have centered on themes of trauma and change, reckoning with the past, female solidarity, and intense female relationships. The Haunting of Velkwood takes up these themes, but with added depth and direction. This feels like the book that Kiste has been working toward over the last several years. Moving and immensely satisfying in its conclusion, The Haunting of Velkwood is (in my opinion) Kiste’s best work yet.

 

Linghun by Ai Jiang

In this strange, delicate, and spare novella, Ai Jiang offers up the story of a haunted town called HOME. Grieving families compete desperately to buy a house in HOME, for if you live in one of these houses there is a chance that the house might summon the spirit of your dead loved one. The novella unfolds through the viewpoints of three characters: Wenqi, a teenage girl whose family has bought and newly moved into a house in Home in the hopes of seeing the spirit of her dead brother; Liam, a teenage boy whose family makes up some of the “lingerers” in the town: homeless people who camp out on the lawns of occupied houses, waiting for a house to go up for a sale; and a  mysterious older woman whose name shifts throughout the book, a woman who possesses one of the coveted houses but has never seen the ghost she so desperately wishes to see.

 

The desperate, all-consuming nature of grief pervades this book. Jiang vividly captures how such grief envelops characters in their own private worlds, and of how this grief can destroy relationships among the living. For me, this came across most heartbreakingly in the stories of Wenqi, Liam, and the other teenagers they know in town. Wenqi loved her brother, but she was very young when he died and it was many years ago. It’s Wenqi’s mother who has dragged her husband and living daughter to HOME, uprooting their former lives. Wenqi believes that her mother loved her son best and would have sacrificed Wenqi for her brother if she could. Heartbreakingly, everything the mother does seems to confirm this belief: Wenqi’s mother is focused wholly on her dead son and neglects her living daughter completely. Liam’s family moved to town for the sake of a dead sister whom Liam never even met and are similarly indifferent to their living son’s feelings.  And other parents are similarly, shockingly, careless of the needs of their own living children for the sake of dead loved ones.

 

The third viewpoint narrative of the novella, that of a woman first called “Mrs,” unrfolds slowly. This is an elderly woman gossiped of as the “crazy” lady in town, a recluse who behaves eccentrically even for HOME. She’s grieving a loved one, of course, like everyone in HOME. But as her story unfolds, the nature and object of that grief subtly shifts. This third strand of narration expands upon the nature of grief: one can mourn a person, of course, but one can also mourn a home, a village, a country, an entire past and way of life.

 

Linghun is a beautiful, lingering meditation on grief, mostly quiet and atmospheric save for one shocking moment of violence. Like Kiste in The Haunting of Velkwood, Jiang depicts a town frozen in time, even though her town is populated by the living as well as the dead. But the living of HOME are caught in the stasis of grief, frozen as surely as the ageless spirits they seek and as surely as the ghosts of Velkwood who repeat the same routines and dialogue endlessly. Both books depict characters struggling to break free from the past, to varying degrees and with varying success. And in both books, there’s a suggestion that one can never break wholly free, that the past may continue to reach out for you or accompany you—whether in the form of an entire haunted town or as something else.