Cracks in the foundation

Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts has aspects of a literary psychological horror novel — in this case from the scenario of Eleanor, the protagonist, hastily purchasing a house after the death of her mother.

The house Eleanor buys seems too good to be true — and it is. Built in what was to be a new development in an isolated valley, the fully finished, picture-perfect show home is one of only two houses completed before the builder went bankrupt and died by suicide in the other house. The house is beautiful but poorly constructed — it represents aspirations and the keeping up of appearances.

Torrential rains begin as soon as Eleanor takes possession, and very quickly the house deteriorates. The front door key stops working because the lock has no protection from water. The house leaks. The shower drips into the light fixtures. A series of expensive and vaguely threatening repairmen traipse through the premises as Eleanor, a therapist, tries her best to continue her client’s appointments online.

Eleanor is also still trying to process the circumstances of her mother’s death and her feelings about it. Her mother was over-involved in her life, to the point of feeding her by hand when she was busy writing her thesis for graduate school. Though way past the age when she should have become independent, Eleanor is inexperienced at paying bills and making decisions for herself. Her new house provides her with a crash course in adulting. This is a coming-of-age story with an edge.

Fu has written two previous novels — the first, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White award, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award and was longlisted for CBC Canada Reads. Her short-story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, won several prizes, including the Danuta Gleed award, and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. Born in Calgary and raised in Vancouver, Fu now lives in Seattle.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is as much about what is not said as it is about what is. There is some suggestion Eleanor experienced sexual mistreatment by a senior male academic while in graduate school, but never discussed in detail. A few contextual clues suggest Eleanor is of Chinese ancestry, but race is not a major theme.

The raising of the tension in this novel is slow and steady, like the water dripping through the cracks in Eleanor’s home. She often has what are either dreams or visions of her mother, as well as hauntings by her, which the reader comes to understand are a consequence of Eleanor’s guilt over the way her mother’s life ended. The frequent dream sequences don’t add anything to the plotline; the stakes in those passages are much lower than those from the deterioration of the house.

Eleanor’s concerns regarding her clients’ sessions largely revolve around the administrative tasks of the online platform — signing in on time, taking notes properly — and less with their actual problems. It is a commentary on the isolation of modern life in general, and of Eleanor’s life specifically, that therapy — a relationship built on trust and confidentiality — can now be done at a distance, over Zoom, between two people who have never met.

From the shopaholic who is not serious about conquering her addiction to the deeply troubled mother who has lost custody of her child, the therapy appointments become the most “normal” part of Eleanor’s day. Surrounded by the noise and chaos of tradespeople, she manages to log in more or less on time and pay more or less attention.

The clients in the therapy sessions represent the outside world — both Eleanor’s efforts to maintain normalcy and a connection to reality — and a sampling of the ghosts of modern life: grief, depression, obsession, excess and pessimism. When Eleanor is finally unable to attend her appointments, we understand that the crisis of the rising water is at its peak.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is an unpretentious and engaging read that successfully balances Eleanor’s interiority with the creepy setting and the jarring intrusions of the other characters.

The real horrors in this novel are not ghosts or the dead, nor the litany of problems experienced by the therapy clients, but the challenges of living in a capitalist society: climate change and environmental catastrophe, the difficulty of finding affordable housing, society’s demand that we continue on with life and work as normal even as we live with the incessant drip of grief, and the largely off-page potential concerns of racism and sexism. For Eleanor, being unhoused may not be the terrible thing it is to her mother — it may be the thing that finally compels her to confront her problems and grow up.

Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April 2025.