Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
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Web ID: 15058460Boring
The cover art is so beutiful, it was also the only thing I enjoyed about this book. The characters were dull and boring and had extremely boring interactions with eachother. The plot was not new at all, it was a typical ghost story with nothing that made it more enjoyable to read than others. I love a good metaphor, but it is not necessary to have as many as this book. It came across as show-offy and repetitive.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Terribly Disappointed
I was terribly disappointed by this book. Truthfully, I grew so bored with the insufferably shallow characters that I had to switch to the audiobook to push my way through it. It honestly kind of felt like the author was more interested in writing a shallow drama than a horror novella. I will probably check out some of Khaw's other books, but this one fell terribly short.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
The cover art got me going…
The book… not so much. I really wanted to love this! It has potential. It has descriptive gore and if it didn’t read like it was all over the place, I know for fact I would’ve enjoyed it more. Too much it overwhelms. Too little to make sense of it. If that makes any sense in itself? A quick read for anyone who likes ghost stories and haunted houses. But plot wise… all over the place with a wtf (but violent) ending.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Enjoyable Quick Horror
This is a pretty good horror novella, and was an interesting and fun little ghost story. The main drawback (for me) is this: all of a sudden the climax happens, and then all of a sudden the story is over. Otherwise, it was an enjoyable read with great prose writing.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Good thing it’s short
This was an extremely short read for no reason that’s good. The only motivation I had was that I needed to finish it. Characters are hard to like, and the words felt AI generated. Best part of the book was the cover.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Tiring to read
Way too much symbolism and metaphors. Like an obscene amount. I feel like Cassandra tried really hard to impress everyone with her vocabulary and it shows she understands big words and how to use them in a sentence but girl make it flow better you know.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Not as scary as I thought
It’s easy to ready and I did like it until the ending, it really wasn’t that scary but it was creepy. Also I had to look up some words to understand the place setting, the architecture of the manor, what kind of ghost/humanoids it was referring to, and a phrase the ghost kept saying. So it took me away from the book and put my imagination on pause.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
A Not-So-Scary Haunted House Character Study
When four friends come together in a haunted mansion to celebrate a wedding, things take a very dark turn when a ohaguro bettari starts surrounding them….but it may be the four humans themselves who are the greatest threat to each other. Khaw’s horror novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, is an unsettling story immersed in Japanese horror. Now, admittedly, I have very little knowledge or experience of the background and origins of a lot the dangerous entities lurking with these pages – so my reading experience might be a bit different than someone who better understands the history and tropes of this specific kind of horror (and I had to do a lot of googling while reading to try and catch myself up!). I knew walking into this novella that it seems to be pretty polarizing. I have seen people who were absolutely swept away by it, and people who absolutely despised it. I knew that it had a not-so-hot sub 3 rating on Goodreads, but the cover and blurb were so enticing I couldn’t help but check it out for myself. And, with this novella in particular, I do recommend checking it out and seeing if its your thing. While this novella definitely won’t be for everyone, and I still had some things I wasn’t super impressed by, on the whole I had a great time reading this novella (and it’s also short). I think it all comes down to knowing what works for you and what doesn’t as a reader, because Khaw goes hard with what she is doing here and that is either going to really work for you, or it will really turn you off. The characters in this book are unlikeable, and you kind of just have to be ok with that. If likable characters are something you need in a story, definitely avoid this one. The main cast includes five characters who are petty, arrogant, and insecure. Our main POV character, Cat, is probably the most likable of the bunch, but that’s pretty much only because we see the story through her perspective. These characters are all broken and working through their own emotions and thoughts; anyone who has read Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six will know if these kinds of characters work for you. Cat and co. would very much fit in with the Atlas Six crew. The major difference with the characters here is their shared history and resultant baggage. It seems like every combination of romantic and sexual relationship between the five is in their past, creating one of those toxic and “incestuous” friend groups (what the show All American wonderfully calls “The Vortex”). The cover of this novella does the book a little bit of a disservice because it mismanaged my expectations. I was expecting something super dark, creepy, and scary (I mean, look at that cover), and what I got instead was some tense and thrilling scenes, but more so an exploration of mental health and the struggles of the quarter life crisis. The main characters in this book are what I would consider “friends by circumstance”; they are not friends because they share interests, but because they grew up together in Malaysia and never really gave up that bond. And now that they are getting older, they have to figure out what is next for them. They have to figure out if they even like each other, and what those relationships might be moving forward. Phillip is still holding onto his “All-American quarterback” popular guy past; Lin is financially successful; and Cat is recovering for a pretty serious depressive episode. And now a wedding within this tangled web of relationships (past and present) are bringing all of their needs and desires to the forefront. Following the lead of The Haunting at Hill House (both the sublime Shirley Jackon original and the also very worthy Mike Flanagan Netflix series), Khaw uses the haunted house genre to explore her characters. Haunted houses are fantastic settings for this because these grand mansions have a lot of room to explore and maneuver, while simultaneously feeling claustrophobic and suffocating. The houses become a reflection of the characters themselves, and their ugly personalities become enmeshed with the old and slowly degrading house. As the characters slowly unhinge from reality, the house also becomes abstracted from any kind of realism – and this is when the novella truly hits its stride. Therefore, this novella is really an examination of not-so-good people rather than being truly spine-tingling horror. While you won’t be jumping out of your seat with fear, Khaw does evoke a aura of foreboding over the entire novella through her vivid writing. Khaw’s prose throughout the novel is absolutely gorgeous and, to be fair, verges a bit on the purple side. Khaw is obviously a big fan of poetic language and her thesaurus, but it contributed to the sense of doom that we all know comes with the haunted house genre. Even when the characters got a bit grating and the story wasn’t as scary as I was anticipating, I was always enthralled by Khaw’s use of language. Khaw inserts a lot of meta-humor about the horror genre in the novella, where characters often make remarks on “who is going to die first” based on their racial or sexual status. As a reader your mileage may vary whether you find these asides are annoying or funny; I would say the closest barometer would be the Scream franchise – if you like its combination of meta-humor and legit thrills, you’ll probably find the small drops of humor in this book to your liking. It is clear that Khaw is a big fan of all of the horror tropes, and loves using this story to comment on them, use them, but also play around with them. If there was anything I was a tad disappointed in it was that much of the meta-humor was at the expense of the “slasher” genre of horror rather than the possessed/haunted house genre that Khaw was writing in here. On the whole, once I managed my expectations and appreciated what Khaw was doing vs. what I expected her to do before I read the first page, I really enjoyed this novella. It is not a perfect book by any means, but it was a satisfying entry to the horror genre. Concluding Thoughts A haunted house novella dripping with dark and macabre prose, Khaw introduces readers to five unlikable people and challenges their pride, insecurities, and personal foibles in all kinds of thrilling and creepy ways. This book won’t work for everyone because it is not scary in the traditional sense, but if you like dark character studies with a sense of foreboding and some really great writing, you should check this one out.
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