Excerpts literary fiction Read an Excerpt From The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Eleanor is unmoored. By Kim Fu | Published on February 17, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu, an eerie lit-fic novel of grief and guilt, publishing with Tin House on March 3. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—so that Eleanor could focus on her career as a therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.Desperate to obey her mother one last time, but finding few options she can afford, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the dark choices she’s made. Sunset came on early, the valley surrounded by mountains and rises on all sides, the sun dropping behind the western hills during Eleanor’s last appointment. She turned on the canned downlights and the wooden chandelier, and the room became almost painfully, clinically bright. It was only then that she realized the house had no window coverings. She had somehow not thought about it all day, or noticed during that first tour—she’d just admired the large windows, the dramatic flood of daylight. In a way, it wouldn’t matter for a long time. There’d be no one to see her until next summer, when Matt had said construction would resume, and the days were only getting shorter, so waking with the sun wouldn’t be an issue. She turned off the downlights. From one of the front windows, she noted that the other house, the black-frame house, did have a mix of curtains and roller shades, some open and some closed. All the windows were dark. She would have to worry about whoever lived there looking in, if in fact someone did live there. There were no other cars. She turned off the chandelier, plunging the room back into darkness. She walked around the perimeter, window to window. She couldn’t make out much in any direction. The distant, tightly packed trees were black in the darkness, as were the empty building sites. Only the gravel road reflected the moonlight. The light in the construction office cut a small square of yellow into the blackened mountainside, but seemed to cast no outward glow. An animal fear rose in her, a sense of being exposed, surrounded, seen and unseeing. She wanted to feel celebratory and adult, her first night in the first home she’d ever owned, but she couldn’t help picturing the house from the outside, her figure visible as she walked from room to room, as she sat at the table, climbed the stairs, got into bed. She tested the taps and flushed the toilets. She felt amazed everything worked, everything was real. She could not bring herself to strip completely to shower, even though the upstairs bathroom had no windows. The air in the bedroom felt stale. The mechanism to open the window was complex: a flip lock on either side, a winch in the middle she had to turn to send the top half of the window outward and up, like a hat brim. That noxious industrial smell of the surrounding land entered the room, but it came with a breeze, carrying the scent of waxy pine needles and turned earth from farther upwind. Buy the Book The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts Kim Fu Buy Book The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts Kim Fu Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget She made up the bed with the clean sheets she’d brought. She smoothed and tucked the bedding crisply. All of this belonged to her. All these bare, lovely rooms, more than she’d ever thought possible. Lele would be proud. She would be relieved to know that Eleanor had broken through the inertial tide that had carried her along since Lele’s death, that she had done something so drastic, invested wisely, transformed loss into safety and power. In her new house, Eleanor told herself, she would stop staying up all night, stop sleeping between clients in the middle of the day, stop drinking so much coffee she could feel her heart vibrating in her throat like a live bird. She would eat regular meals, take her own therapeutic advice, rejoin the land of the living. Here, she would choose what to remember and what to forget. * * * Rain pattering on the skylight woke her in the night. She got up and closed the window, fumbling to remember how in the dark, which way to wind the handle, unsure if the locks had caught their latches. She felt her way back into the bed. She looked up at the skylight, droplets striking the glass and forming ripples and dimples, lulling her with their gentle drumbeat. A hand slipped into Eleanor’s under the duvet. Small, bony. Callused fingers, but preternaturally soft along the thin skin of the back, from the hand cream Lele had kept in her purse and beside every sink, applied a dozen times a day. Lele lay beside her, flat on her back. She wore the cotton pajamas she’d died in, buttoned to the collar and densely patterned with orange flowers, each bloom the size of a fingernail. Her grip was loose and limp. Lele turned just her head toward Eleanor, smiling—a mischievous, impish grin she’d never worn in life. In the first months after Lele died, Eleanor had of course seen her everywhere: in a stranger’s gait as they walked down the sidewalk, in the slant of their shoulders, the back of any dark head of hair. Any woman with her coloring, her height, or any single shared feature—her rounded nose in profile, her unpierced ears, a coat she might have worn—had entered Eleanor’s field of vision as Lele. Before the turn, as in a magic trick, before the betrayal that revealed they had been someone else all along. But never like this, never a sustained visitation in her bed—a Lele that stayed, a Lele she could touch. The smile on her face ground against Eleanor’s memories like an ill-fitting gear. You’re not my mother, she thought, the knowledge immediate, reflexive. But of course it wasn’t. It was a pleasant, lucid-feeling dream, something Eleanor had made for herself. A housewarming gift from her own mind. * * * The rain, in the morning, had turned violent, now crashing upon the skylights as though trying to break through. Wind drove the water sideways, lashing against the windows. The warping streams made it appear as though the house were underwater. Eleanor had woken late, in the murky aquarium light. She had a client in less than half an hour. She was alone. As she stepped out of bed, Eleanor’s bare feet landed in a puddle. Water was pooling beneath the bedroom window she’d opened the night before. A thin stream of water ran down the inside of the glass. She must not have closed it fully. She unlocked and opened the window. Water gushed in and onto her pajamas and feet, from where it had pooled along the top of the frame. She winched it closed as tightly as she could. When she depressed the locks, they felt softer than before, and didn’t click. She had left the moving box containing towels on the upstairs landing. She tore the tape open with her hands, grabbed one, and used it to sop up the puddle as best she could. Over her wet pajamas, she threw on one of her rotation of solid-colored sweaters that were presentable from the chest up. She rushed downstairs, leaving wet footprints. The wind was rattling the windows, and a louder, metallic rattling, like a propeller on a loose bolt, was coming from the kitchen. She sat down at her computer, the other chairs tucked in around the dining table, hurriedly pulling her hair into a bun as the platform loaded. Her client appeared on-screen. Choppy when in motion, edges and borders softened. He talked, as he had for the last four sessions, about his more accomplished older brother. “Let’s revisit some of our strategies for dealing with envy,” Eleanor said. She leaned forward as she answered the session-end prompts, the font small and unscalable, her face six inches from the screen. When she sat back, closing the laptop lid, her eyes darted left, drawn to a change, something out of place. Lele sat in the chair at the head of the table. She was dressed in the same orange pajamas, smiling again, but now her mouth was stretched tight, her eyes blank, as though she’d been posing too long for a photograph. For a photographer who would neither take the picture nor let her go. Excerpted from The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu. Copyright © 2026 Kim Fu. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts</i> by Kim Fu appeared first on Reactor.