Books book reviews Haunted Houses, Haunted Wombs: The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee A slow-burn horror novel about a haunting that causes so much suffering it turns demonic. By Mahvesh Murad | Published on October 27, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Bestselling novelist Jen Sookfong Lee’s latest novel The Hunger We Pass Down is an emotional, dark look at intergenerational trauma, motherhood and the wounds we carry in our hearts and bodies that never quite heal, no matter how far we go, how fast we run, or how self aware we think we have become.  Vancouver, 2004: Alice is overwhelmed. By her cloth diaper start up, by her children, by her ex-husband, her mother and even by the bartender she’s having a secret relationship with. She’s drinking far too much and is now having blackout episodes in which she does not recall tidying the house, making up diaper packages for customers, preparing the kids’ meals or having important conversations with her boyfriend. She’s starting to see things that don’t make any sense, too.  Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1938: Little Gigi routinely walks by Nam Koo Terrace, aware of the stories of a girl who died there, her ghost continuing to haunt the mansion. As a teenager, when she is kidnapped and imprisoned there as a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers during the war, she meets the ghosts of the house and is unable to escape them, even as she plans her own (and her newborn baby’s) escape from the mansion.  Gigi’s trauma passes from her to her daughter Bette, who emigrates to Canada, and from Bette to Judy, Alice, Luna—four generations of daughters who carry the trauma of rape and abuse, as they navigate life through the decades, as their worlds change around them. The narrative focuses mostly on Alice and Gigi, with chapters dedicated to each of the other characters too, providing a wide, all-encompassing view of the story. Not every perspective has as much worth (the two men’s POV chapters appear almost just to show us how they aren’t really all that important), but they do all add to the expanse of this multi-textural narrative.  Alice’s story is pivotal to the book, and while she is neither the first nor the last in the line of women who bear the horror, she is the most relatable, given her modern life as a single mother in a fast growing city. Alice lives in the house her parents lived in—the house in which she has seen her father die an early death, the house in which her own marriage fell apart and her children grew away from her as she dedicated her days to her business, and her nights to alcohol and her secret affair with a local bartender. But something else lives in the house too, a presence that is making itself increasingly felt, and not just in benevolent ways. Alice’s daughter Luna is also wary of what is going on, and as much as Alice wants to, she cannot be the “perfect” mother Luna is looking for. Is there another Alice present, a doppelgänger, an evil twin, some creature creeping out of an open wound in Alice? She considers “the hunger for survival that is passed down, repeated, and then passed down again, and wondered what she had already given to Luna without even knowing it. She wondered what trauma lay dormant in her body, what she had never felt because she didn’t know what to look for.” Buy the Book The Hunger We Pass Down Jen Sookfong Lee Buy Book The Hunger We Pass Down Jen Sookfong Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The thing that haunts Alice has everything to do with the cruelties Gigi had to bear at the hands of the occupying soldiers in Hong Kong during World War II, when she was enslaved as a comfort woman. With no agency, no chance at freedom and endless days of abuse at the hands of countless nameless men, Gigi would tell stories to the other girls to distract herself and them, stories she’d base on the ghosts of the women who lived in the house before the occupation, ghosts only she could see and hear. The daughter who committed suicide to avoid being married off as part of a business deal, the maid who was abused by her employer, the mistress was who mistreated: As one of the ghosts tells Gigi, “this house eats up all the women, all the girls. And then we are trapped here forever.” Their pain becomes her pain, their trauma, her trauma. It’s a horrific cycle that continues in the body and psyche of the daughter Gigi gives birth to, and carries on to her daughter Judy, who tries her best to run away from it. But when Alice is faced with a physical manifestation of that trauma and loss, Judy is forced to reveal the details of their lineage, and of the curse that “was just a rotten, tortured life” that has its claws in the Chow women. The Hunger We Pass Down doesn’t just contain ghosts and hauntings; it also features a fair bit of body horror, in that the curse takes on a physical manifestation in multiple different ways.  Judy recognises the curse when her parents die, as realisation that feels like “a cold shock, like being thrown into a lake without knowing how to swim—swift, frigid, inexorable, unforgiving. She knew how to spot a curse, how to recognise when it’s growing inside you. Her mother had taught her how her entire life.” Try as she might to escape it, it grows inside her until it becomes a part of Alice, who many years later is forced to “birth” it, when she finds something on “the lawn and between her knees… a pool of liquid, an impossible nothing of a colour, so thick and gelatinous, quivering on the grass,” it is a birth that leaves her “empty, as if her body was nothing more than skin and the thinnest layer of muscle.”  There is plenty of body horror and trauma in actual human birth, and in motherhood itself, of course, and Lee isn’t afraid to lean into that idea either. “Women carry everything with them,” we are told, as we see each woman struggle to bear that burden, uncertain where and how to release it when it clings to them with claws. The Hunger We Pass down is about the trauma that lives in our physical bodies—trauma that we inherit.  We know now that women’s bodies carry the DNA of their grandmothers through a process called foetal microchimerism, and so it makes sense for Lee to have used this as more than metaphor: Judy has literally carried the trauma in her womb, and Alice has inherited it, lived with it, shared her life with it and is trying desperately not to pass it down to Luna.  This isn’t a sweet, poignant story of a woman breaking the vicious cycle of trauma. This is a story of a haunting that causes so much suffering that it turns demonic. There are no fixes here. There is no healing for the women who “had been passing down their anger for generations.” The feeling of dread is heavy in this slow burn novel, as Lee takes a clear look at intergenerational trauma in the Chinese diaspora, at feminine rage and the immense grief that rage stands on.[end-mark] The Hunger We Pass Down is published by Erewhon Books. The post Haunted Houses, Haunted Wombs: <i>The Hunger We Pass Down</i> by Jen Sookfong Lee appeared first on Reactor.