Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw Review

Five friends rent out a haunted old Japanese house for a spooky wedding - but turns out them advertised ghosts is real and ghosty is getting revengey!

Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth appealed to me because it’s a haunted house story, which I love, and it’s set in an old Japanese house, which I’ve never seen before, so it’s disappointing to say the book is actually a stinky pile of ectoplasm.

Horror in general is hard to write and really good haunted house stories are few and far between, but Nothing But Blackened Teeth fails especially badly at both attempts. All that happens is that the group run around the old house at night while the ghost possesses one of them and smiles, showing off its blackened teeth. It’s such unimaginative storytelling.

The cast are an unlikeable group of moronic upper-class twonks. Why they’re friends at all in the first place is a mystery as they seem to loathe each other from the beginning. Almost all of the book is these five idiots bickering about their past relationships and vapid love triangles with one another. I didn’t care about any of it or what was going to happen to them.

Khaw seems to think it’s clever to have some of the characters break the fourth wall by talking about “this is the part in the movie/story where this character dies/this thing happens, har har”, which isn’t smart, it’s annoyingly twee and irrelevant. She also throws in Japanese terms to describe the ghost’s appearance - like ohaguro-bettari and shiromuku - without explaining what they are, so you can’t picture what on earth she’s talking about.

Lazy cliches abound - the house happens to have a library that happens to have a book explaining the ghostly situation and how to fight the evil spirit (how convenient!) - and the backstory of the haunting couldn’t be less creative. The ending is contrived rubbish and the “emotional” finale is painfully forced.

This book reads like an amateurish first draft. Thoroughly underwhelming and boring garbage through and through, don’t bother with Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Bad Writing!