Nothing but Blackened Teeth - Cassandra Khaw
Published in 2021 by Nightfire, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, NY
125 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-250-87951-6 (trade paperback)
LCCN: 2021033056
LCC: PR9530.9.K49 N68 2021
When it comes to the horror genre, many people dismiss it as macabre and philosophically shallow. Yet, beyond all of the blood and gore, horror reveals the return of the repressed and brings us to the edge of the thinkable. According to philosopher Eugene Thacker, horror forces us to consider the world beyond the human. In grappling with human fragility and futility in the face of an indifferent and often hostile cosmos, horror articulates the outer limits of our ability to comprehend our place in the world.
As a fan of horror literature across the centuries, I must admit that most horror stories I have consumed have been Western-centric. From the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft to the beautifully gothic atmospheres of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, most of my foundational experiences with the horror genre are rooted in the Western (and overwhelmingly white) canon. As such, when I saw a work of horror written by a nonbinary Asian author set in contemporary Japan, I was excited to expand my horizons. As such, in their 2021 novella, Nothing but Blackened Teeth, Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw attempts to fuse elements of Japanese folklore with modern horror fiction.
Overview:
At the heart of the book lies a compelling premise: five bourgeois, thrill-seeking former friends convene in a dilapidated Japanese mansion to celebrate a macabre wedding. Nadia, the bride-to-be, wants to fulfil her dream of marrying her boyfriend in a haunted house. Their host, Phillip, finances the trip, while Cat, the narrator, has recently been released from hospitalization for depression and is plagued by unsettling premonitions. Yet, a night of drunken debauchery and spiteful verbal sparring quickly devolves as a vengeful, hungry spirit makes herself known to the group.
Allegedly from the Heian period, the mansion is haunted by the spirit of a woman who was buried alive after being abandoned by her groom, and it is suggested that young women have been ritually sacrificed over centuries to keep her company. The spirit appears to be loosely inspired by the ohaguro-bettari, a yokai (or more specifically a noppera-bō, or “faceless ghost”) known for its eerie facelessness and blackened teeth. As the night progresses, the internal dynamics of the group become increasingly fractured, as old grievances resurface. Yet, with the ohaguro-bettari threatening to rip them limb from limb, will the group be able to overcome their own personal demons and escape the night alive?
Commendations:
There are a few notable strengths to Khaw’s horror tale. Firstly, the book has an undeniably interesting premise, especially as Khaw incorporates elements of Japanese folklore into a classic ghost story. Khaw’s use of the ohaguro-bettari is a smart and evocative choice. The ohaguro-bettari (literally, “nothing but blackened teeth”) is a culturally resonant figure rooted in Edo-period visual and oral folklore, as it is a supernatural being associated with the dichotomy between an eerie sense of beauty and hidden monstrosity. The symbolism of the ohaguro-bettari as representative of women reduced to pure aesthetics and horror finds many parallels in contemporary feminist critiques of gender, patriarchy, and social invisibility, especially within feudal Japanese society.
Furthermore, by situating the narrative in a Heian-era mansion, Khaw taps into the deep spatial history of architecture-as-memory within Japanese religious and folkloric traditions. The idea that a house can “hold” the emotional and spiritual residue of human suffering is drawn from Shinto-Buddhist beliefs about impurity, ritual defilement (kegare), and lingering spirits (yūrei). The mansion becomes a kind of container inscribed with the collective trauma of the past and present.
Accordingly, the novella’s human dynamics involving fraught friendships, jealousy, trauma, and emotional manipulation form the core of the plot. Cat, the narrator, is a deeply unreliable and wounded protagonist. Her depression, drug use, and dissociation serve as critiques of late capitalist alienation, particularly for racialized women in post-colonial modernity. The interpersonal toxicity between these individuals can be interpreted as a metaphor for how neoliberal social structures isolate, commodify, and devour human bonds.
Relatedly, the former friends are essentially petit bourgeois tourists, commodifying Japanese spirituality and trauma as “exotic” content for a destination wedding. This reflects the phenomenon of ghost tourism at its most grotesque. In this scenario, the group is performing a kind of spiritual gentrification that transforms deeply held religious and cultural touchstones into commodities to be consumed. Yet, these very supernatural forces are turned against the group, which can represent the return of the repressed. As such, the book is just as much about emotional scars and unresolved history as it is about supernatural terror.
From a literary standpoint, Khaw’s prose leans heavily into heavy-handed lyricism and interiority, often evoking a symbolist tradition reminiscent of writers like Tanizaki or even early Mishima. While highly divisive, the overwrought, metaphor-laden style of Khaw’s writing can be generously interpreted as an intentional resistance to the “transparent” prose of much commercial horror. In that sense, Khaw could be engaging in a postmodern disruption of genre expectations. As such, Khaw’s effort to elevate non-Western folklore and reject Eurocentric horror tropes is commendable. In a publishing industry still dominated by Anglo-American mythologies (e.g., vampires, ghosts, witches), this can be seen as a subversive act of cultural reclamation.
Critique:
On the other hand, Nothing but Blackened Teeth suffers from several serious setbacks. Quite frankly, it is by far one of the worst books that I’ve read in a long time. First and foremost, the characters themselves are wholly one-dimensional and frankly awful. The majority of the novella is taken up by toxic interpersonal bickering among this group of emotionally stunted characters. Their dialogue is drenched in bitterness, jealousy, trauma, and passive-aggression, but little of it has political or psychological depth.
Rather than interrogating the philosophical or historical dimensions of haunting, such as the ritualized violence against women, class stratification, or colonial entanglements, the story devolves into a series of navel-gazing conversations that read like dramatized Twitter threads or Facebook comments. Every single one of the characters is deeply unlikeable, and the reader will likely root for them all to die by the end. As such, the dialogue, thick with passive aggression and half-digested trauma, recalls the self-awareness of social media discourse more than the existential dread of classical gothic literature.
This inward turn toward psychodrama might have succeeded were it not for the cloyingly suffocating prose style that dominates the book. Khaw’s language is often described as “lyrical,” but it frequently lapses into overwrought metaphor, stacked similes, and a kind of poetic obfuscation that substitutes ornament for clarity. It lazily gestures toward beauty and offers a shallow sense of profundity, lacking the rhetorical discipline of truly effective poetic writing.
What might function beautifully in a poem or lyrical essay becomes unwieldy and unnatural in a genre that relies on narrative momentum and emotional clarity. Instead of horror building through precision, restraint, or the unveiling of the uncanny, Khaw offers a barrage of purple prose that often reads like a graduate student trying to impress a seminar class or writing workshop group. This aestheticism feels at odds with the novella’s horror aspirations, dulling the impact of key revelations and rendering the ghost more decorative than terrifying.
This would be forgivable if the prose revealed something profound about cultural norms or emotional truth. Instead, it often obscures more than it reveals. As a writer, I recognize this impulse to “write beautifully” as a form of resistance against plainspoken genre norms. But beauty without clarity simply becomes an affectation, or a style in service of itself, with no desire to connect with the reader or invite them into the story.
In terms of broader structural critique, the book falters in its deeper engagement with the very cultural and historical materials it seeks to invoke. At the heart of Nothing but Blackened Teeth lies a superficial engagement with Japanese folklore. While Khaw references the ohaguro-bettari, the text treats her more like a horror film Easter egg than a culturally rooted figure. The ghost exists not as a subject with agency or context, but as a gothic flourish meant to decorate the protagonists’ emotional dysfunction. The ghost here isn’t a moral agent or a symbol of ancestral wrath, karmic imbalance, or spiritual reckoning, as yokai often are in Japanese tradition. Instead, she’s a “cool-looking” monster inserted into a narrative (and adorning the front cover) that is primarily about the psychodrama of five self-involved Westernized twenty-somethings.
From the perspective of a scholar of religion and folklore, I found Khaw’s novella to be a cautionary example of aesthetic appropriation and narrative superficiality. What could have been a powerful engagement with Japanese gendered folklore remains a visual motif rather than a narrative engine. The novella trades on the presumed exoticism of its setting, offering readers an atmospheric but ultimately shallow portrait of a haunted house with little regard for the complex spiritual, historical, or architectural meanings embedded in such a structure.
Likewise, the decision to place the narrative in a “Heian-era” mansion further reveals the limits of Khaw’s historical and cultural imagination. Despite the invocation of a rich period in Japanese literary and religious history, the novella does little to ground its setting in Heian aesthetics, cosmologies, or ritual life. While Khaw clearly respects Japanese folklore, the narrative ultimately engages it aesthetically more than structurally.
As such, the Heian period is named, but not meaningfully explored, its history reduced to mere haunted wallpaper. There is no engagement with the concept of mono no aware (impermanence), no echoes of courtly literature such as The Tale of Genji, nor any sense of how Heian-era beliefs about death, impurity, or the supernatural would shape the presence and behavior of a vengeful spirit. There is no engagement with Heian religious rituals, such as the jichinsai, to appease land spirits. There is no acknowledgement of esoteric Buddhism's influence during the Heian period, which would have shaped any belief in ghostly persistence. There is no exploration of the courtly aesthetics and gender politics of the Heian elite, despite the premise involving a jilted bride and sacrifice. As such, without these elements, the mansion is ultimately reduced to a generic haunted house, or a gothic vessel emptied of its historical specificity and cultural resonance.
Khaw, a Malaysian author of Chinese descent, is writing from outside the Japanese cultural framework she borrows from. This fact in itself is not problematic. However, the lack of critical engagement with this positionality or with the ethics of folklore appropriation weakens the novella’s legitimacy as a cultural artifact. The novella runs the risk of fetishizing Japanese horror, plucking symbols such as blackened teeth and haunted brides without fully exploring their cultural embeddedness. While Khaw is of Southeast Asian heritage herself, this still edges close to a kind of diasporic orientalism, where “Japan” becomes shorthand for stylized suffering. What might have been a diasporic dialogue with Japanese myth becomes instead a hollow echo of it.
This amounts to a kind of folkloric extractivism, in which symbols from a non-Western cultural archive are mined to decorate a Western-style narrative, without giving those symbols their own epistemological ground. Khaw does not seriously engage with the ontological stakes of Japanese spirit beliefs, funerary customs, or Shinto-Buddhist cosmology. Instead, Japanese culture becomes set dressing for an otherwise standard melodrama (and an uninteresting one at that). As a scholar of religion, I find this ethically troubling. As a reader, I find this disheartening.
What is perhaps most troubling, however, is the novella’s place within the alignment of the logic of commodified horror. At a mere 128 pages, Nothing but Blackened Teeth reads more like a proof-of-concept than a fully realized work of fiction. Its small size and thin plot are perfectly tailored for consumption, especially in light of contemporary publishing market trends. Yet this brevity comes at the cost of cultural, emotional, and intellectual depth. The short length undermines its ambitions, as the haunting unfolds too quickly, the resolution is incredibly rushed, and the characters are drawn too thinly.
The novella's pacing mirrors an all-too-common trend within contemporary horror media in the era of streaming: the settings are atmospheric and stylized, but the plot and characters are ultimately ephemeral and wholly forgettable. Khaw’s novella leverages Japanese folklore as an exotic spectacle for a largely Anglophone audience, with no serious reflection on positionality, cultural responsibility, or the politics of representation. In essence, the book is a horror novella tailor-made for the content economy, not for cultural transmission, political engagement, or literary immersion.
Conclusion:
Overall, while Nothing but Blackened Teeth had the potential to be a bold entry in the contemporary horror canon, it ultimately fails to deliver a meaningful engagement with the folklore it commodifies. Rather than offering horror as cultural critique and honoring the dimensions of Japanese ghost traditions, it exploits them for surface-level aesthetic gain. Its entirely unlikeable characters, unimaginative, cliched plot, and overwrought prose will likely turn off all but the most dedicated reader, and its rushed conclusion will likely leave them dissatisfied. At just over a hundred pages, it’s somehow simultaneously fast-paced and plodding. If you favor straightforward scares or tightly plotted narratives, the heavy emotional undercurrents, cringy dialogue, and highly stylized writing might not land for you.
This is especially disappointing because the book had the potential to be a critique of contemporary horror, especially as a work by a non-white, Southeast Asian author navigating genre spaces historically dominated by Eurocentric voices. Instead, what we’re left with is a novella that commodifies trauma, appropriates Japanese folklore, and displaces cultural meaning in favor of setting an eerie mood. It reads like the first draft of a pretentious MFA student who believes that their extended vocabulary and excessive, obscure metaphors automatically make their writing deep. What results instead is an overindulgent and frustrating novella that doesn’t utilize horror as critique, but rather as a hollow aesthetic.
For scholars and readers invested in the decolonial, feminist, and culturally situated possibilities of horror literature, Nothing but Blackened Teeth is a text best approached with caution. It is a salient example of how even well-intentioned diversification efforts can replicate the very logics of appropriation and erasure they claim to resist. As such, I would recommend pairing this text with classical Japanese ghost stories (e.g., Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan), Buddhist funeral texts, and feminist critiques of yokai traditions to ground students in the complex cultural tapestry from which Khaw draws. At the end of the day, at least my wife and I now have an inside joke between us as we occasionally repeat an uncomfortable, but strangely hilarious simile from the book that refuses to leave our brains: “Glib as the first word out of a babe’s milk-wet mouth.”