Books book reviews Home of Dreams and Nightmares: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu A different take on the haunted house novel. By Tobias Carroll | Published on April 2, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share In the beginning was the haunted house, and it was scary. Consider the primal aspects of the concept of home: If we’re talking in Hobbesian terms—yes, I’m making use of those political science courses I took years ago—the “state of nature” is a place of constant unrest. Presumably, a home is intended as a break from all that, a metaphorical and literal shelter from the storm. And yet there’s a flip side to that: the fear that comes from realizing that the place you thought was a safe harbor is every bit as dangerous as the parts of life you sought to escape. Or, to put in terms of early humans looking for a place to settle down and faced a rude awakening: There’s something that was in the cave first, and it’s bigger than you, and hungrier, and has very sharp teeth. In the beginning was the haunted house, and it was enough. But there’s also the desire of every storyteller to see just how expansive they can make things, to test the limits of the boundary of this particular subgenre and see how it can be altered, shifted, and edited into something new. In this space in the last year and a half, I’ve written about Rivers Solomon’s Model Home and Cherie Priest’s It Was Her House First. Both of them could be described as haunted house narratives; they are also both radically different from one another. See also Juan Martinez’s Extended Stay (technically about an uncanny hotel) and The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan. And so we come to Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, which is also a haunted house novel of a sort, and yet feels like nothing like any of the books that I mentioned elsewhere in the paragraph. The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts begins in a mysterious place: with its protagonist Eleanor on the roof of a house. The reason why isn’t entirely clear, but the section ends on an especially ominous note: If only, that first day Eleanor saw the house, she’d hesitated longer, made a lower offer. If only one of Matt’s kids had woken up that morning with the flu, or an accident had blocked off the highway, or the rains had started sooner, washing out the mountain road. If only. Matt, it turns out, is a realtor Eleanor is working with to buy a house. Though Eleanor has been looking for one for a while, she hasn’t been working with him long; he’s filling in for his colleague Mary, who’s taking parental leave. Gradually, Fu reveals more about Eleanor. Her mother, Lele, recently died. Eleanor works as a therapist, though her career options are limited due to leaving her PhD program early. She had an excellent reason for doing so: namely, the predatory behavior and actions of her mentor. Eleanor is a challenging character to have at the center of a novel like this, as she’s enduring a deep depression, both from her mother’s recent death and from the lingering effects of the first years of the pandemic. (Some of Eleanor’s conversations with her colleagues are about their preferences for in-person versus virtual therapy sessions.) Her efforts to buy a house place her in a proactive place, but she’s also fulfilling her mother’s wishes by doing so. And despite the fact that Lele dies before this book begins, she is a major presence in the book, from the inheritance she left Eleanor, intended for a down payment, to the way that she and her daughter prepared for her death. If the initial allusions to this event seem sparse in Fu’s telling, there’s a reason for that: Gradually, a fuller picture emerges of how those days went, and precisely how they affected Eleanor. 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 These early scenes also establish that Eleanor is already someone with a fraught relationship to the idea of “home.” Lele is an overprotective parent, as the parents of only children often are. (Full disclosure: I am an only child.) One of the people tasked with educating her instead betrayed her. Another colleague of hers, Teddy, seems affable enough, but also appears to harbor an attraction to Eleanor, which makes their friendship that much more fraught. There’s also the matter of the house that Eleanor ends up buying, a new building that was initially created as part of a residential community that stalled out. If you assume that there’s a story there, and that that story is not a good one, you would be correct. There’s a perfect storm of events that lead to a worrisome outcome: Mark urging Eleanor to make an offer on the house right away and to forgo some due diligence in making an offer. It isn’t clear if this is him providing sound advice or trying to sell a potential lemon; in the end, it doesn’t matter. Once Eleanor moves in, flaws with the structure become impossible to ignore. There’s also the matter of Lele’s presence lingering there. That last one is meant literally. Lele’s ghost sure seems to be a presence in Eleanor’s new home—which is dissonant in its own right, as she presumably never set foot in the place during her lifetime. That new home has a terrible history all its own, as well as a striking visual: a model home directly across from it that provides a surreal mirror to the building where Eleanor is trying, desperately, to settle in and begin healing. Lele’s visitations are treated less as occasions for dread and more as mysteries unto themselves. Given the degree to which this novel remains in Eleanor’s head, it’s also possible that Lele’s appearances should not be taken literally. However, Fu’s matter-of-fact prose finds a good balance between describing someone whose perception of the world is askew and the genuinely uncanny things that they witness. This time, when [Eleanor] emerged from the dream, finding herself back in bed, when she called out for Lele, she was there. She sat at the foot of the bed, facing away from Eleanor, the hair at the back of her head patchy and grey, the orange flowers spilling down her spine. Lele stood and made her way to the bedroom door without ever showing her face, her back always to Eleanor, her steps stately and measured. One of the interesting elements of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is that, title notwithstanding, the most overt ghost in it—i.e. Lele—isn’t vengeful at all. It’s reminiscent, of all things, of the film Crimson Peak, where the restless dead aren’t trying to harm the protagonist, but are instead trying in their way to warn her about the very alive murderer with designs on ending her life. There’s a moment early on in the novel when Matt urges Eleanor to “waive inspection” that’s the home ownership version of Chekhov’s gun on the mantlepiece. The consequences of that action are both absurd and horrific, prompting disquieting images of a pristine home turning increasingly unfamiliar. This scene also establishes one of the running themes of the novel: A substantial number of characters’ interactions are rooted in simple economics, with little chance that they will ever become something deeper.  If there’s a flaw here, it’s that Fu has placed a lot of elements into a relatively short novel. Eleanor’s grief for her mother and her reconnection to an old flame represent one thread; her economic precarity is another, as are her attempts to navigate life on her own without Lele’s active involvement in her life. There’s also the matter of Lele’s ghost and the accumulation of disasters in her house, as well as her professional travails; Fu has a knack for the way people can use therapeutic language in both appropriate and fraught situations. But there’s also a sense that this book could have been even more effective had it been longer; there’s plenty taking place here, but not all of it feels fully resolved by the conclusion. What Fu does especially well is finding a way to make this kind of narrative feel urgent in 2026. Why are we seeing an uptick in riffs on haunted houses now? I’d point to the lingering effects of the Great Recession on homeownership and, more broadly, to a growing sense of economic precarity throughout society. A 2017 New York Times Magazine article by Matthew Desmond bore the headline “How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality,” and if that isn’t a scary story in its own right, I’m not sure what is. There are plenty of causes for dread and fear in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. It’s telling that the most prominent ghost among them is not high on that particular list.[end-mark] The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is published by Tin House.Read an excerpt. The post Home of Dreams and Nightmares: <i>The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts</i> by Kim Fu appeared first on Reactor.