Publishers Weekly
08/08/2022
Chen (Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies) offers a haunting if overstuffed drama of a Taiwanese family’s efforts to rise out of poverty. After Keith Chen arrives back in Yongjing, having spent a decade in prison in Germany for killing his lover, T, he reunites with his older sisters Beverly, Betty, and Belinda during the monthlong annual Ghost Festival, in which residents leave out offerings for the dead. Each sibling, as well as supporting characters, takes desperate measures to improve their lives. Beverly, the eldest, gets pregnant by the gambler Little Gao. Betty runs errands for the owners of the Tomorrow Bookstore before it gets shut down by the police for selling banned books. Belinda has an abusive husband and, in one poignant episode, visits Keith in prison. These strands, along with flashbacks of Keith’s relationship with T in Berlin, have a sort of stuttered pacing, but Chen does a great job creating atmosphere. A hot bowl of soup “smell like a snake, silently slithering around your ankle, up your leg, around your waist,” and termites “nibbl with fervid desperation.” Eventually, Chen gets into the nightmarish details around T’s killing, but it takes too long to bring everything together. Though vivid, this ambitious novel is a bit too unwieldy. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Intense and operatic... Ghost Town is reminiscent of the dreamlike narratives of Can Xue and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will require readers to hold on tight to their sense of reality as the prose blurs lines between the living and the dead, the past and the present, and finally, the guilty and the innocent.”—Leland Cheuk, NPR
★ “Kevin Chen has done a masterful job of managing his material, creating multidimensional characters, a beautifully realized setting, and an apposite surprise ending. Meanwhile, Chen and his family's stories are uniformly interesting, and seamless in their portrayal of the characters’ intersecting lives... this resulting book is excellent.”—Booklist (Starred Review)
★ “At once vibrant and tartly observant, Chen’s tour de force reveals how we all hold onto the ghosts of the past... A highly recommended story of past, identity, and family.”—Library Journal (Starred Review)
“Ghost Town is the literary equivalent of a suitcase jammed full to the point of bursting. Characters, memories, regrets, choices, consequences, secrets, history, politics, real estate, sex: They’re all pressed together close, like unwashed clothes after a long trip. Open the case up even a little bit and the dirty laundry starts spilling out...life gets messy, and Chen is an author who can handle it.”—Peter C. Baker, The New York Times Book Review
“This slow burn of a multigenerational family saga, told from multiple perspectives and going back and forth through time, unfolds delicately while pulling readers ever deeper into its web... It’s a hypnotic and unforgettable read.”—Buzzfeed, A Best Book of October
“A cinematic, sprawling family epic unfurls with exceptionally crafted characters—living, dead and in between.”—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
“Dark and eerie... A rich and layered reading experience... Darryl Sterk’s translation has a dreamlike quality, and it’s clear how much care he took to render the nuances of the original Taiwanese into English. This isn’t an easy read, but like a ghost, it lingers.”—BookPage
“Chen knows how to engage and tease his readers. His narratives are riddled with mysteries that exude magic, absurdity, suspense, cruelty, and shame, constantly whetting our curiosity until all the strands of the plot finally come together...Canadian translator Darryl Sterk...has preserved the authentically Taiwanese flavor of Chen’s text, forging a literary language full of pleasant surprises.”—New Southbound Policy Portal
“Kevin Chen gives voice to the whole family, living members as well as dead, dropping hints at surprising skeletons in the closet as he slowly, mesmerizingly reveals the family’s secrets.”—The A.V. Club, A Best Book of October 2022
“An impressive, sweeping tale centered around a large, traditional Taiwanese family.”—CrimeReads, A Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2022
“A stunning novel about a small town in the Taiwan countryside and a family haunted by their own ghosts.”—Buzz Magazine (UK)
“Rich and complicated.”—The News Lens
“Ghost Town is a masterpiece of twenty-first century Taiwanese 'native soil' literature.”—United Daily News (Taiwan)
“Magical, fierce, pungent, and cruel.”—BIOS Monthly
“Despite the heavy subject matter, the book is never maudlin. In fact, true to paradoxical form, it manages to be light and heavy at the same time. The characters, whether deceased or not, seem truly alive. The sadness comes, perhaps, from the living seeming most alive in their past, the dead seeming most alive in their present.”—Litro Magazine
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2022
At once vibrant and tartly observant, Chen's tour de force—a Taiwan Literature Award winner—reveals how we all hold onto the ghosts of the past. After his release from a Berlin prison for having killed his boyfriend T, Keith Chen returns to his backwater Taiwanese hometown, arriving in time for the all-important Ghost Festival. At first, he sees only the bright flowers, but we know from the expertly unfolded stories that it's not a happy place. Elder brother Keith was mayor and then imprisoned, sister Beverly sews clothing for Europeans she can't afford herself, Belinda is married to an abusive news anchor, troubled Barbie hides in her home, and Betty, a household registrar in Taipei, is attacked following accusations that she's not seeing-eye dog—friendly. The mystery of bodacious sister Plenty's suicide sums up the family's pain. "The cruelest people weren't your homeroom teacher or the police. It was us," says the ghost of Keith's father. Driven out for his sexuality, Keith seems to have been happy with handsome blond cellist T, whose death is the question mark driving the narrative. VERDICT A highly recommended story of past, identity, and family.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-10-12
A haunted family saga from a winner of the Taiwan Literature Award for Books.
“It’s Ghost Festival today, the Day of Deliverance. The ghosts are coming. I’ve come back, too.” This is what Keith Chen says to his lover as Keith stands in front of the house where he grew up. Or, rather, this is what Keith would say if his lover were by his side—if his lover was still alive. Keith is returning to his backward, backwater hometown after spending time in a German prison for killing that lover. He’s seeking memories, but not all of the memories he encounters are welcome ones, and he and his family are surrounded by unquiet spirits—and, although still living, are unquiet spirits themselves, haunting their own lives. Running beneath the whole narrative is the secret story of the death of Keith’s lover. The ideas that Chen (the author, not the character) is playing with are familiar to anyone who has read Gothic literature—from Wuthering Heights to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). And there are moments when Chen creates a truly eerie atmosphere. One of the many characters who narrates this novel—himself a ghost—describes all of Yongjing awakening as his wife and the other women of the town chant during an impromptu morning ritual: “The ghosts in the public cemetery all woke up, too, as did the weeds, the tree snags, and the fallowed fields, along with the molds, the rice stalks, and the wildflowers. All the living, the dead, and the living who wished they were dead in that small town were woken rudely up.” But, despite the diversity of narrators, there isn’t much diversity of voice—a lack of interiority makes it difficult to distinguish one character from another—and most of this story is told in a flat, expository style that is, ultimately, wearying. There is something initially powerful in the way that Chen presents cruelty as commonplace, but this stylistic choice quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. It seems likely that most readers will either become anesthetized to the brutality or simply quit reading.
Chen’s exploration of generational trauma is both too much and not enough.
