Ghost Town wasn't scary, but it certainly was intense!

 

I’m talking about Ghost Town by Kevin Chen today. I discovered this book because the city I work in (sadly, don’t live in) has a queer bookstore and I went into it looking for a specific book. I did find the book I was looking for, but I also thought that I might as well have a little look around while I was there. It ended up being because I took that little look around that I ended up spotting, and buying, this book.

I will give a couple content warning: This book does have reference to self-harm, suicide and assault of a couple different kinds.

The blurb says that Keith Chen, the desperately yearned for second son of a traditional Taiwanese family with five daughters, refuses to play the role his parochial parents would cast him in. Instead, he chooses to make a life for himself in cosmopolitan Berlin, where he finally finds acceptance as a young gay man. The novel takes place about a decade later, on Ghost Festival, the Day of Deliverance. After his release from a maximum-security prison, Keith has nowhere to go. His parents are gone, and so are his siblings (for one reason or another). As he explores his uncanny hometown, we learn what tore his family apart, and the truth behind the terrible crime he committed in Germany. Ghost Town is the mesmerizing story of family secrets, countryside superstitions, and the search for identity amid a clash of cultures.

Chapter one opens with Keith giving this person, T, a fake recount of where he’s from and what his hometown is really like after being asked a slew of questions. You then get this really raw, just awful, account of what Yongjing, his hometown, is actually like. There’s this rancid ditch, a woman who committed s-word. But also, Keith killed T. That was the end of the first chapter, with the reader finding out Keith killed T. I was gagged, I’m not going to lie. It was just so out of nowhere, but hey, it explained why Keith was in jail. Chapter two is Keith’s sister, Beverly, I don’t know if it was her telling the reader about her life, but the reader learns about her life regardless, and a bit of family history. But basically, she’s a seamstress and she is struggling with the dollar. It did seem like the first few chapters were basically different members of Keith’s family and what they were up to. You also get the inevitable thing of Keith has returned home to this little ghost town that he’s been away from for ages, so naturally things have all changed for him. The market he was used to diminished in size because a chain supermarket opened, a food place (I don’t remember if it was specifically a restaurant) changed ownership from the old owner to his son, and Keith mentions that the flavours weren’t passed down.

The way the book is told was odd. Not bad odd, just odd in that I’d never read anything like it. A lot of it was just like Keith was telling T what was happening. And even after reading the blurb, I was expecting the book to only follow Keith around, trying to find his family, or something like that. The book wasn’t like that at all, it was more stories and voices of some of the members of his family, alive and dead, talking about what’s going on and what has gone on in their lives to lead to the point where he’s gotten to Yongjing and as to why it is the way it is.

While this book definitely didn’t go in the direction I thought it would, I thought it was going to be, like I said, just following Keith around Yongjing, but I really appreciated that it wasn’t actually. You do learn bits about Keith and his life through the chapters following him, but you also learn bits about his life from his sisters. One of his sisters, Betty, she ends up seeing a photo of Keith with T, and they’re kissing. There’s another moment where one of the other family members walks in on Keith with another boy. Homeboy Keith goes through a lot of things before he even leaves Taiwan.

I could describe this book like a bunch of lengths of different coloured ribbons, together in a whirlpool, slowly all going towards the centre. Everyone’s life and story was a different ribbon, then as you get further through the book, things start to form together. Things that happened to the characters earlier in the book get their explanations and their places for when and how they actually happened, but in those explanations, they slowly get more and more detailed. This is a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but besties, some of these details… they got a little more graphic than I tend to like to read. And I don’t mean graphic as in explicit, there definitely were explicit moments, but I mean graphic. You can refer back to the content warnings I mentioned in the beginning of this post, as that’s what the graphic nature pertains to. Additionally, as more detail is added, you end up seeing more of each of the characters and members of the Chen family.

To talk about the characters very briefly, the simplest thing I could say about them is that they’ve all got their problems, issues and red flags. You know how in some books, especially in YA (this definitely isn’t YA, by the way), you might sometimes have that innocent character that just deserves the world? I can confidently say that I don’t think there was a single character in this book that was like that. But even having said that, with the way the story was being told, I was really interested in seeing how things played out at the end.

There’s one bit I want to share about one of the characters, Cicada.

“Your mother Cicada didn’t know how to read or write, but she sure knew how to start a rumor”. And you know what? That line worked me out. Like, this book is so serious, like I mentioned, it has some pretty graphic and explicit stuff, but then my ass read this line and the following bits in the book. Cicada? Miss Cicada? She is a messy bitch. The rumours she was starting? Absolutely rancid stuff about the people in the town. This is the kind of thing that I meant when I said the characters aren’t good people. Like, Cicada would just start rumours about her neighbours and their kids. Messy messy bitch.

For my final thoughts, this book was massively different to the stuff I normally read. I tend to lean more towards YA or YA-leaning type of book, just because I feel like I know the tropes of them pretty well. Still, even though this wasn’t the normal kind of thing I’d go for, I still found it an interesting read, even if there were a few bits graphic bits that I did have a full bodily reaction to.

Okay, bye!